In an effort to get some work done on my robot, I’d like to offer a small bounty for help with some parts. I’m going to start off very small, but hopefully as time advances (and my finances improve), I’ll be able to offer larger sums.

The first bounty will be a very modest €50 for a C console application which can do the following:

• Accept two filenames from the command line as input, which correspond to two photographs of one scene, taken parallel to each other, separated by about 6 inches. The cameras may not be exactly parallel, and my be slightly twisted or unfocused, relative to each other, so the application should be relatively intelligent about that.
• From those files, extrapolate 3D shapes and textures, and echo them to STDOUT. The format of the output should be well known. I offer VRML and X3D as ideas, but if there is another more-apt language, then that will be acceptable.
• Any textures needed should be output as images to the current directory as 1.png, 2.png, etc.
• The application should run in Linux, and must not use up a huge amount of RAM.
• The application may use other libraries to achieve the goal (in fact, I’d recommend this, to make maintenance easier), but those libraries must be open source.

The closing date for this is July 1. All solutions offered will be compared for efficiency and accuracy, against a few different models created in POV-Ray, and also against real-life photographs.

If no solutions are submitted, I will announce the project again, with a higher bounty (probably increasing by another 50, or 100).

All applications submitted should have the source-code readily available.

Once an application is accepted, it will immediately be released as open source. You will be asserted as the author of the code, but the ownership of the code will be public.

I know the bounty is kind of low, but it’s really just to drum up interest, and I’m not all that wealthy 😉

This project is really an experiment. If it is successful, I have many other projects that I want done, which I will also announce bounties for.