Lockheed Martin’s Hydra Fusion builds 3D maps in real time from drone footage

A drone is a great eye in the sky, but if you want richer data than what its cameras show — for example, detailed 3D maps — you might be looking at a few hours of processing time. That is, unless your HQ is rocking Lockheed Martin’s cool-sounding Hydra Fusion tools, which can build that 3D map in real time from just video.

It’s an impressive feat of photogrammetry — which, if you didn’t know, is the technique of minutely tracking features in a series of images to determine their absolute sizes and positions. Computational photogrammetry is useful, and has been applied to all manner of scientific and military pursuits — recently, it has helped reconstruct and map historical siteswith impressive accuracy.

An example of Lockheed’s photogrammetry in action — a 3D map of Oahu.

But it’s also a computationally demanding process: since each pixel must be scrutinized with care, analyzing hours of HD video was best left to the supercomputers at home. Fortunately, modern GPUs are basically sandwich-sized supercomputers, so Lockheed Martin popped a few of those in the payload to do the work in real time.

The result isn’t anything you’d want to put on your wall — think early Apple Maps — but it’s good enough that a drone could, for instance, make a second pass at low altitude, following the curves of the landscape and avoiding buildings it didn’t know were there the first time. It would also be useful for quick and dirty reconnaissance — perhaps sending the 3D map back to the special ops team’s new iPhones.

Just what exactly is powering Hydra Fusion, Lockheed hasn’t said. I contacted them to ask about that and pricing, which is probably a sliding scale that depends on whether your budget is in the millions or billions. I’ll update this article if they get back to me.

Sources: TechCrunch