Reconstructing 3D virtual environments within a collaborative e-infrastructure

Sets of two dimensional images are insufficient to capture the development in time and space of three-dimensional structures. The 2D 'flattening' of photographs results in a significant loss of features especially if the photos were taken by one person. Automatically collecting and aligning photos in order to render 3D structures from 2D images without specialized equipment, is currently a complex process that requires specialist knowledge with often limited results. In this paper, an Open Science oriented workflow is proposed where an on-line file system is used to share photos of an object or an environment and to produce a virtual reality scene as a navigable 3D reconstruction that can be shared with other people. Our workflow is based on a distributed e-Infrastructure and overcomes common limitations of other approaches by having all the used technology integrated on the same platform and by not requiring specialist knowledge. A performance evaluation of the 3D reconstruction process embedded in the workflow is reported against a commercial software and an open-source software in terms of computational efficiency and reconstruction accuracy, and three marine science use cases are reported to show potential applications of the workflow.