Multiple Depth and Normal Maps for Shape from Multiple Views and Visual Cues

This paper introduces the sculptor's principle a new framework for shape representation and surface reconstruction from multiple shape cues. On one hand, a new shape from local brightness algorithm based on a standard voxel volume representation is presented. The sculptor's principle, on the other hand, provides the basis for a new and efficient representation of object surfaces by multiple depth maps. The sculptor's principle, in a natural way, combines shape information from complementary information sources such as multiple depth maps, multiple views, or multiple complementary shape cues. This leads to an elegant solution of the fusion problem, and to an efficient representation of object surfaces. Surface reconstruction based on multiple depth maps is illustrated with depth from contours. The surface representation by multiple depth maps is reconstructed with O(N2n2) operations where N is the number of views and n2 is the number of pixels in an image. For moderate N, this leads to very fast reconstruction algorithms. The additional storage requirement is O(Nn2) and thus only equals the amount of storage required to store the original images.