Shape from silhouette using Dempster-Shafer theory

This work proposes a novel shape from silhouette (SfS) algorithm using the Dempster-Shafer (DS) theory for dealing with inconsistent silhouettes. Standard SfS methods makes assumptions about consistency in the silhouettes employed. However, total consistency hardly ever happens in realistic scenarios because of inaccuracies in the background subtraction or occlusions, thus leading to poor reconstruction outside of controlled environments. Our method classify voxels using the DS theory instead of the traditional intersection of all visual cones. Sensors reliability is modelled taking into account the positional relationships between camera pairs and voxels. This information is employed to determine the degree in which a voxel belongs to a foreground object. Finally, evidences collected from all sensors are fused to choose the best hypothesis that determines the voxel state. Experiments performed with synthetic and real data show that our proposal outperforms the traditional SfS method and other techniques specifically designed to deal with inconsistencies. In addition, our method includes a parameter for adjusting the precision of the reconstructions so that it could be adapted to the application requirements. (C) 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.