Multi-camera scene reconstruction via graph cuts

Abstract

We address the problem of computing the 3-dimensional shape of an arbitrary scene from a set of images taken at known viewpoints. Multi-camera scene reconstruction is a natural generalization of the stereo matching problem. However, it is much more difficult than stereo, primarily due to the difficulty of reasoning about visibility. In this paper, we take an approach that has yielded excellent results for stereo, namely energy minimization via graph cuts. We first give an energy minimization formulation of the multi-camera scene reconstruction problem. The energy that we minimize treats the input images symmetrically, handles visibility properly, and imposes spatial smoothness while preserving discontinuities. As the energy function is NP-hard to minimize exactly, we give a graph cut algorithm that computes a local minimum in a strong sense. We handle all camera configurations where voxel coloring can be used, which is a large and natural class. Experimental data demonstrates the effectiveness of our approach.