Dense 3D reconstruction of symmetric scenes from a single image

Abstract

A system is presented that takes a single image as an input (e.g. showing the interior of St.Peter's Basilica) and automatically detects an arbitrarily oriented symmetry plane in 3D space. Given this symmetry plane a second camera is hallucinated that serves as a virtual second image for dense 3D reconstruction, where the point of view for reconstruction can be chosen on the symmetry plane. This naturally creates a symmetry in the matching costs for dense stereo. Alternatively, we also show how to enforce the 3D symmetry in dense depth estimation for the original image. The two representations are qualitatively compared on several real world images, that also validate our fully automatic approach for dense single image reconstruction. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.