Multi-camera Scene Reconstruction via Graph Cuts

We address the problem of computing the 3-dimensional shape of an arbitrary scene from a set of images taken at known viewpoints. Multi-camera scene reconstruction is a natural generalization of the stereo matching problem. However, it is much more difficult than stereo, primarily due to the difficulty of reasoning about visibility. In this paper, we take an approach that has yielded excellent results for stereo, namely energy minimization via graph cuts. We first give an energy minimization formulation of the multi-camera scene reconstruction problem. The energy that we minimize treats the input images symmetrically, handles visibility properly, and imposes spatial smoothness while also preserving discontinuities. Our approach handles a large class of possible camera configurations, namely all configurations handled by Seitz and Dyer’s voxel coloring algorithm. Experimental data demonstrates the effectiveness of our approach.