Abstract We present a novel tool for reverse engineering of modeling histories from consecutive 3D files based on a timeline abstraction. Although a timeline interface is commonly used in 3D modeling packages for animations, it has not been used on geometry manipulation before. Unlike previous visualization methods that require instrumentation of editing software, our approach does not rely on pre‐recorded editing instructions. Instead, each stand‐alone 3D file is treated as a keyframe of a construction flow from which the editing provenance is reverse engineered. We evaluate this tool on six complex 3D sequences created in a variety of modeling tools by different professional artists and conclude that it provides useful means of visualizing and understanding the editing history. A comparative user study suggests the tool is well suited for this purpose.

Time-of-Flight cameras provide high-frame-rate depth measurements within a limited range of distances. These readings can be extremely noisy and display unique errors, for instance, where scenes contain depth discontinuities or materials with low infrared reflectivity. Previous works have treated the amplitude of each Time-of-Flight sample as a measure of confidence. In this paper, we demonstrate the shortcomings of this common lone heuristic, and propose an improved per-pixel confidence measure using a Random Forest regressor trained with real-world data. Using an industrial laser scanner for ground truth acquisition, we evaluate our technique on data from two different Time-of-Flight cameras1. We argue that an improved confidence measure leads to superior reconstructions in subsequent steps of traditional scan processing pipelines. At the same time, data with confidence reduces the need for point cloud smoothing and median filtering.