Interactive reconstruction of virtual environments from video sequences

There are many real-world applications of Virtual Reality requiring the construction of complex and accurate threedimensional models that represent real environments. In this paper, we describe a rapid and robust semi-automatic system that allows such environments to be quickly and easily built from video sequences captured with standard consumer-level digital cameras. The system combines an automatic camera calibration algorithm with an interactive model-building phase, followed by automatic extraction and synthesis of surface textures from frames of the video sequence. The capabilities of the system are illustrated using a variety of example reconstructions. r 2003 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.