Figure 1: From left to right: one of the 40 images captured by a handheld camera under natural conditions; the recovered hair rendered with the recovered diffuse color; a fraction of the longest recovered hair fibers rendered with the recovered diffuse color to show the hair threads; the recovered hair rendered with an artificial constant color. In this paper, we propose a novel image-based approach to model hair geometry from images taken at multiple viewpoints. Unlike previous hair modeling techniques that require intensive user interactions or rely on special capturing setup under controlled illumination conditions, we use a handheld camera to capture hair images under uncontrolled illumination conditions. Our multi-view approach is natural and flexible for capturing. It also provides inherent strong and accurate geometric constraints to recover hair models. In our approach, the hair fibers are synthesized from local image orientations. Each synthesized fiber segment is validated and optimally triangulated from all visible views. The hair volume and the visibility of synthesized fibers can also be reliably estimated from multiple views. Flexibility of acquisition, little user interaction, and high quality results of recovered complex hair models are the key advantages of our method.

We present a novel method to reconstruct the 3D shape of a scene from several calibrated images. Our motivation is that most existing multi-view stereovision approaches require some knowledge of the scene extent and often even of its approximate geometry (e.g. visual hull). This makes these approaches mainly suited to compact objects admitting a tight enclosing box, imaged on a simple or a known background. In contrast, our approach focuses on largescale cluttered scenes under uncontrolled imaging conditions. It first generates a quasi-dense 3D point cloud of the scene by matching keypoints across images in a lenient manner, thus possibly retaining many false matches. Then it builds an adaptive tetrahedral decomposition of space by computing the 3D Delaunay triangulation of the 3D point set. Finally, it reconstructs the scene by labeling Delaunay tetrahedra as empty or occupied, thus generating a triangular mesh of the scene. A globally optimal label assignment, as regards photo-consistency of the output mesh and compatibility with the visibility of keypoints in input images, is efficiently found as a minimum cut solution in a graph.

We present a new approach to reconstruct the shape of a 3D object or scene from a set of calibrated images. The central idea of our method is to combine the topological flexibility of a point-based geometry representation with the robust reconstruction properties of scene-aligned planar primitives. This can be achieved by approximating the shape with a set of surface elements (surfels) in the form of planar disks which are independently fitted such that their footprint in the input images matches. Instead of using an artificial energy functional to promote the smoothness of the recovered surface during fitting, we use the smoothness assumption only to initialize planar primitives and to check the feasibility of the fitting result. After an initial disk has been found, the recovered region is iteratively expanded by growing further disks in tangent direction. The expansion stops when a disk rotates by more than a given threshold during the fitting step. A global sampling strategy guarantees that eventually the whole surface is covered. Our technique does not depend on a shape prior or silhouette information for the initialization and it can automatically and simultaneously recover the geometry, topology, and visibility information which makes it superior to other state-of-theart techniques. We demonstrate with several high-quality reconstruction examples that our algorithm performs highly robustly and is tolerant to a wide range of image capture modalities. 1.

Figure 1: A few façade modeling examples from the two sides of a street with 614 captured images: some input images in the bottom row, the recovered model rendered in the middle row, and three zoomed sections of the recovered model rendered in the top row. We propose in this paper a semi-automatic image-based approach to façade modeling that uses images captured along streets and relies on structure from motion to recover camera positions and point clouds automatically as the initial stage for modeling. We start by considering a building façade as a flat rectangular plane or a developable surface with an associated texture image composited from the multiple visible images. A façade is then decomposed and structured into a Directed Acyclic Graph of rectilinear elementary patches. The decomposition is carried out top-down by a recursive subdivision, and followed by a bottom-up merging with the detection of the architectural bilateral symmetry and repetitive patterns. Each subdivided patch of the flat façade is augmented with a depth optimized using the 3D points cloud. Our system also allows for an easy user feedback in the 2D image space for the proposed decomposition and augmentation. Finally, our approach is demonstrated on a large number of façades from a variety of street-side images.

Figure 1: Two close-ups of the parts 1 and 2 of a modeled city area shown in the first two rows. All the models are automatically generated from input images, exemplified by the bottom row. The close-up of the part 3 is shown in Figure 15. We propose an automatic approach to generate street-side 3D photo-realistic models from images captured along the streets at ground level. We first develop a multi-view semantic segmentation method that recognizes and segments each image at pixel level into semantically meaningful areas, each labeled with a specific object class, such as building, sky, ground, vegetation and car. A partition scheme is then introduced to separate buildings into independent blocks using the major line structures of the scene. Finally, for each block, we propose an inverse patch-based orthographic composition and structure analysis method for façade modeling that efficiently regularizes the noisy and missing reconstructed 3D data. Our system has the distinct advantage of producing visually compelling results by imposing strong priors of building regularity. We demonstrate the fully automatic system on a typical city example to validate our methodology. Keywords: Image-based modeling, street view, street-side, building modeling, façade modeling, city modeling, 3D reconstruction.

Figure 1: Image-based modeling of a tree. From left to right: A source image (out of 18 images), reconstructed branch structure rendered at the same viewpoint, tree model rendered at the same viewpoint, and tree model rendered at a different viewpoint. In this paper, we propose an approach for generating 3D models of natural-looking trees from images that has the additional benefit of requiring little user intervention. While our approach is primarily image-based, we do not model each leaf directly from images due to the large leaf count, small image footprint, and widespread occlusions. Instead, we populate the tree with leaf replicas from segmented source images to reconstruct the overall tree shape. In addition, we use the shape patterns of visible branches to predict those of obscured branches. We demonstrate our approach on a variety of trees. 1

This paper describes a new vision based method for the Simultaneous Localization and Mapping of mobile robots. The only data used is a video input from a moving calibrated monocular camera. From the detection and matching of interest points in images at video rate, robust estimates of the camera poses are computed in real-time and a 3D map of the environment is reconstructed. The computed 3D structure is constantly refined thanks to the introduction of a fast and local bundle adjustment method that makes this approach particularly accurate and reliable. Actually, this method can be seen as a new visual tool that may be used in conjunction with usual systems (GPS, inertia sensors, etc) in SLAM applications.

A joint segmentation is a simultaneous segmentation of registered 2D images and 3D points reconstructed from the multiple view images. It is fundamental in structuring the data for subsequent modeling applications. In this paper, we treat this joint segmentation as a weighted graph labeling problem. First, we construct a 3D graph for the joint 3D and 2D points using a joint similarity measure. Then, we propose a hierarchical sparse affinity propagation algorithm to automatically and jointly segment 2D images and group 3D points. Third, a semi-supervised affinity propagation algorithm is proposed to refine the automatic results with the user assistance. Finally, intensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approaches. 1.

We investigate the problem of automatically creating 3D models of man-made environments that we represent as collections of textured planes. A typical approach is to automatically reconstruct a sparse 3D model made of points, and to manually indicate their plane membership, as well as the delineation of the planes: this is the piecewise planar segmentation phase. Texture images are then extracted by merging perspectively corrected input images. We propose an automatic approach to the piecewise planar segmentation phase, that detects the number of planes to approximate the scene surface to some extent, and the parameters of these planes, from a sparse 3D model made of points. Our segmentation method is inspired from the robust estimator RANSAC. It generates and scores plane hypotheses by random sampling of the 3D points. Our plane scoring function and our plane comparison function, required to prevent detecting the same plane twice, are designed to detect planes with large or small support. The plane scoring function recovers the plane delineation and quantifies the saliency of the plane hypothesis based on approximate photoconsistency. We finally refine all the 3D model parameters, i.e. the planes and the points on these planes, as well as camera pose, by minimizing the reprojection error with respect to the measured image points, using bundle adjustment. The approach is validated on simulated and real data.

Fully automatic 3D modeling from a catadioptric image sequence has rarely been addressed until now, although this is a long-standing problem for perspective images. All previous catadioptric approaches have been limited to dense reconstruction for a few view points, and the majority of them require calibration of the camera. This paper presents a method which deals with hundreds of images, and does not require precise calibration knowledge. In this context, the same 3D point of the scene may be visible and reconstructed in a large number of images at very different accuracies. So the main part of this paper concerns the selection of reconstructed points, a problem largely ignored in previous works. Summaries of the structure from motion and dense stereo steps are also given. Experiments include the 3D model reconstruction of indoor and outdoor scenes, and a walkthrough in a city. 1.