Global Three-Dimensional reconstruction from Occluding Contours

International audienceThis paper considers the problem of 3D surface reconstruction of nonpolyhedral objects through a series of images taken by a moving camera. We propose a new direct method of surface reconstruction which is based on 3D regularized uniform bicubic B-spline surface patches. This reconstruction is achieved by observing the motion of occluding contours where the view lines graze the surface. It is shown that such a reconstruction of 3D surface is possible when the motion of the camera is known, with the exception of those fully concave parts where no view line can be tangential to the surface. Once a set of overlapping B-spline surface patches which constitute the 3D surface of an object are recontructed, our developed method can fuse them efficiently to obtain a global surface. This is based on 3D triangular mesh and regularized uniform bicubic B-spline surface interpolation. This method differs from some of the previous works: First, it considers the problem of regularization on the 3D surface instead of smoothing the contours in the 2D image. Second, we propose a global surface recovery from small local patches. Previous authors have been content only with the recovery of some local properties of the surface such as 3D shape position and surface curvature estimation. Experimental results are presented for both synthetic and real data