An Image-based Inexpensive 3D Scanner

An image-based model reconstruction system is described in this paper where real images of a rigid object acquired under a simple but controlled environment are used to recover its three dimensional geometry and its surface texture. Based on a multi-image calibration method, an algorithm to extract the rotation axis of a turn-table has been developed. Furthermore, this algorithm can be extended to estimate robustly the initial bounding volume of the object to be modeled. The coarse volume obtained is then carved using a stereo correction method which removes the disadvantages of silhouette-based reconstruction by photoconsistency. The concept of surface particles is adapted in order to extract a texture map for the model. Some existing metrics are used to measure the quality of the reconstructed models.