Coarse-to-fine surface reconstruction from silhouettes and range data using mesh deformation

We present a coarse-to-fine surface reconstruction method based on mesh deformation to build watertight surface models of complex objects from their silhouettes and range data. The deformable mesh, which initially represents the object visual hull, is iteratively displaced towards the triangulated range surface using the line-of-sight information. Each iteration of the deformation algorithm involves smoothing and restructuring operations to regularize the surface evolution process. We define a non-shrinking and easy-to-compute smoothing operator that fairs the surface separately along its tangential and normal directions. The mesh restructuring operator, which is based on edge split, collapse and flip operations, enables the deformable mesh to adapt its shape to the object geometry without suffering from any geometrical distortions. By imposing appropriate minimum and maximum edge length constraints, the deformable mesh, hence the object surface, can be represented at increasing levels of detail. This coarse-to-fine strategy, that allows high resolution reconstructions even with deficient and irregularly sampled range data, not only provides robustness, but also significantly improves the computational efficiency of the deformation process. We demonstrate the performance of the proposed method on several real objects. (C) 2009 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.