Student Builds AI Tool to Convert Single Photos Into 3D Flythrough Maps

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A second-year student developed DepthWizard, a pipeline that transforms a single 2D image into an interactive 3D flythrough using monocular depth estimation and semantic segmentation. The project was built as a submission for Smart India Hackathon, where it competed against around 160 teams but did not advance past the internal round. The system combines several open-source tools — including Depth Anything V2, SAM 2, Open3D, and CesiumJS — to reconstruct georeferenced 3D meshes from ordinary satellite, drone, or camera images without specialized hardware. The tool was conceived to address the high cost and complexity of traditional 3D terrain mapping methods, with potential use cases in disaster response, infrastructure planning, and unmapped regions. The developer noted that converting relative depth output into accurate, georeferenced elevation data remains the hardest unsolved challenge, and plans to complete a fully working version by the end of the academic year.

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