Vadstena 3D Reality‑capture System

Melown Technologies designs, develops and operates a proprietary, fully automatic 3D natural and urban landscape reconstruction software system, codenamed Vadstena. From a single set of aerial images, Vadstena produces a geometric 3D model, orthoimagery, DEM and land cover in a single unified, automatic process.

Vadstena is based on extensive in-house R&D in the fields of structure from motion, image processing, pattern recognition, computational geometry, and convolutional neural networks.

Designed from the start for clustered, multi-node operation, Vadstena achieves near-linear scalability and is applicable to very large projects, spanning entire cities or countries. Within Melown Technologies, it is operated on an off-the-shelf server farm comprising six computational nodes, 28 CPU cores and 19 GPUs.

Vadstena can handle diverse types of input data, including UAV-based close-range imagery, datasets from oblique camera systems, and low-overlap nadir imagery. Vadstena native output formats are open and documented. By adherence to the ESRI I3S specification, the output is readily usable in the geospatial industry.