3-D surface reconstruction from stereoscopic image sequences

Abstract

A stereoscopic scene analysis system for 3-D modeling of objects from stereoscopic image sequences is described. A dense map of 3-D surface points is obtained by image correspondence, object segmentation, interpolation, and triangulation. Emphasis is put on the accurate measurement of image correspondences from grey level images. The surface geometry of each scene object is approximated by a triangular wire-frame which stores the surface texture in texture maps. Sequence processing serves to track camera motion and to fuse surfaces from different view points into a consistent 3-D surface model. From the textured 3-D models, highly realistic image sequences from arbitrary view points can be synthesized using computer graphics techniques.