A Skeleton-Based 3D Shape Reconstruction of Free-Form Objects with Stereo Vision

In this paper, an efficient approach is proposed for recovering the 3D shape of a free-form object from its arbitrary pair of stereo images. In particular, the reconstruction problem is treated as the reconstruction of the skeleton and the external boundary of the object. The reconstructed skeleton is termed as the line-like representation or curve-skeleton of the 3D object. The proposed solution for object reconstruction is based on this evolved curve-skeleton. It is used as a seed for recovering shape of the 3D object, and the extracted boundary is used for terminating the growing process of the object. NURBS-skeleton is used to extract the skeleton of both views. Affine invariant property of the convex hulls is used to establish the correspondence between the skeletons and boundaries in the stereo images. In the growing process, a distance field is defined for each skeleton point as the smallest distance from that point to the boundary of the object. A sphere centered at a skeleton point of radius equal to the minimum distance to the boundary is tangential to the boundary. Filling in the spheres centered at each skeleton point reconstructs the object. Several results are presented in order to check the applicability and validity of the proposed algorithm.