Global Three-Dimensional Surface Reconstruction from Occluding Contours

This paper considers the problem of three dimensional surface reconstruction of non polyhedral objects through series of images taken from a moving camera. We propose a direct method of surface reconstruction which is based on regularized uniform bicubic B-spline surface patches 35]. This reconstruction is achieved by observing the motion of occluding contours 1, 9, 33], i.e., where the view lines graze the surface. It has been shown that reconstruction of such a three dimensional surface is possible when the camera motion 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 three dimensional surface of an object are reconstructed. We propose an eecient method of fusing them to obtain a global surface. This approach is based on triangular mesh and surface interpolation by using regularized uniform bicubic B-spline surface patches. This approach diiers with previous work: rst it states directly the problem of regularization on the three dimensional surface instead of smoothing the contours in the two dimensional image. Secondly, we propose global surface recovery from small local patches. Previous authors have been content with the recovery of only some local properties of the surface such as curvature or normal curvature estimation. Experimental results are presented for both synthetic and real data.