Realistic surface reconstruction of 3D scenes from uncalibrated image sequences

This contribution addresses the problem of obtaining 3D models from image sequences. A 3D surface description of the scene is extracted completely from a set of uncalibrated camera images of the scene. No prior knowledge about the scene or about the camera is needed to build the 3D models. The only assumptions are the rigidity of the scene objects and opaque object surfaces. The modelling system. described here uses a three-step approach. First, the camera pose and intrinsic parameters are calibrated by tracking salient feature points throughout the sequence. Next, consecutive images of the sequence are treated as stereoscopic image pairs, and dense correspondence maps are computed by area matching. Finally, dense and accurate depth maps are computed by linking together all correspondences over the viewpoints. The depth maps are converted to triangular surfaces meshes that are texture mapped for photo-realistic appearance. The feasibility of the approach has been tested on both real and synthetic data and is illustrated here on several outdoor image sequences. Copyright (C) 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.