Multi-View Reconstruction and Camera Recovery using a Real or Virtual Reference Plane

• Main Author: Rother, Carsten
• Format: Doctoral Thesis
• Language: English
• Published: KTH, Numerisk analys och datalogi, NADA 2003
• Subjects: Computer Vision; 3D Reconstruction; Virtual Model; Virtual Reality; VR; Augmented Reality; Synthetic Models; Image based Rendering
• Online Access: http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:kth:diva-3463; http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:isbn:91-7283-422-6

Reconstructing a 3-dimensional scene from a set of2-dimensional images is a fundamental problem in computervision. A system capable of performing this task can be used inmany applications in robotics, architecture, archaeology,biometrics, human computer interaction and the movie andentertainment industry. Most existing reconstruction approaches exploit one sourceof information to tackle the problem. This is the motion of thecamera, the 2D images are taken from different viewpoints. Weexploit an additional information source, the reference plane,which makes it possible to reconstruct difficult scenes whereother methods fail. A real scene plane may serve as thereference plane. Furthermore, there are many alternativetechniques to obtain virtual reference planes. For instance,orthogonal directions in the scene provide a virtual referenceplane, the plane at infinity, or images taken with a parallelprojection camera. A collection of known and novel referenceplane scenarios is presented in this thesis. The main contribution of the thesis is a novel multi-viewreconstruction approach using a reference plane. The techniqueis applicable to three different feature types, points, linesand planes. The novelty of our approach is that all cameras andall features (off the reference plane) are reconstructedsimultaneously from a single linear system of imagemeasurements. It is based on the novel observation that camerasand features have a linear relationship if a reference plane isknown. In the absence of a reference plane, this relationshipis non-linear. Thus many previousmethods must reconstructfeatures and cameras sequentially. Another class of methods,popular in the literature, is factorization, but, in contrastto our approach, this has the serious practical drawback thatall features are required to be visible in all views. Extensiveexperiments show that our approach is superior to allpreviously suggested reference plane and non-reference planemethods for difficult reference plane scenarios. Furthermore, the thesis studies scenes which do not have aunique reconstruction, so-called critical configurations. It isproven that in the presence of a reference plane the set ofcritical configurations is small. Finally, the thesis introduces a complete, automaticmulti-view reconstruction system based on the reference planeapproach. The input data is a set of images and the output a 3Dpoint reconstruction together with the correspondingcameras.