Evolutionary-based 3D reconstruction using an uncalibrated stereovision system: Application of building a panoramic object view

Abstract

In this paper, we propose an original evolutionary-based method for 3D panoramic reconstruction from an uncalibrated stereovision system (USS). The USS is composed of five cameras located on an arc of a circle around the object to be analyzed. The main originality of this work concerns the process of the calculation of the 3D information. Actually, with our method, 3D coordinates are directly obtained without any prior estimation of the fundamental matrix. The method operates in two steps. Firstly, points of interest are detected in pairs of images acquired by two consecutive cameras of the USS are matched. And secondly, using evolutionary algorithms, we jointly compute the transformed matrix between the two images and the respective depth of the points of interest. The accuracy of the proposed method is validated through a comparison with the depth values obtained using a traditional method. In order to perform 3D panoramic object reconstruction, the process is repeated for all the pairs of consecutive cameras. The 3D points thus obtained throughout the successive steps of the process which correspond to the different points of interest, are combined in order to obtain a set of 3D points all around the analyzed object. © 2010 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC.