Propagated photoconsistency and convexity in variational multiview 3d reconstruction

In this paper, we make two contributions. Firstly, we replace the generic balloon constraints widely used in 3D reconstruction by a more sophisticated data-dependent re-gional term. The key idea is to propagate classical photo-consistency along visual rays into regional values describ-ing voxel probabilities for being inside or outside the ob-served object. Secondly, we cast the optimization as one of minimizing a convex functional. Therefore (up to visibility) the reconstruction problem can be solved in a globally opti-mal manner in a spatially continuous setting. Compared to graph cut methods, this approach does not suffer from dis-cretization artifacts and exhibits considerable reduction in memory requirements. Experimental comparisons clearly show the advantages of the proposed technique. 1