Projective visual Hulls

Svetlana Lazebnik, Yasutaka Furukawa, Jean Ponce

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

This article presents a novel method for computing the visual hull of a solid bounded by a smooth surface and observed by a finite set of cameras. The visual hull is the intersection of the visual cones formed by back-projecting the silhouettes found in the corresponding images. We characterize its surface as a generalized polyhedron whose faces are visual cone patches; edges are intersection curves between two viewing cones; and vertices are frontier points where the intersection of two cones is singular, or intersection points where triples of cones meet. We use the mathematical framework of oriented projective differential geometry to develop an image-based algorithm for computing the visual hull. This algorithm works in a weakly calibrated setting - that is, it only requires projective camera matrices or, equivalently, fundamental matrices for each pair of cameras. The promise of the proposed algorithm is demonstrated with experiments on several challenging data sets and a comparison to another state-of-the-art method.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Pages (from-to)137-165
Number of pages29
JournalInternational Journal of Computer Vision
Volume74
Issue number2
DOIs
StatePublished - Aug 2007

Keywords

  • 3D photography
  • Frontier point
  • Oriented projective geometry
  • Projective differential geometry
  • Projective reconstruction
  • Silhouette
  • Visual hull

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Software
  • Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
  • Artificial Intelligence

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