3-D Scene Modeling from Stereoscopic Image Sequences

A vision--based 3--D scene analysis system is described that is capable to model complex real--world scenes like buildings automatically from stereoscopic image pairs. Input to the system is a sequence of stereoscopic images taken with two standard CCD Cameras and TV lenses. The relative orientation of both cameras to each other is estimated by calibration. The camera pair is then moved throughout the scene and a long sequence of closely spaced views is recorded. Each of the stereoscopic image pairs is rectified and a dense map of 3--D surface points is obtained by area correlation, object segmentation, interpolation, and triangulation. 3--D camera motion relative to the scene coordinate system is tracked directly from the image sequence which allows to fuse 3--D surface measurements from different view points into a consistent 3--D scene model. The surface geometry of each scene object is approximated by a triangular surface mesh which stores the surface texture in a texture map. From..