Direct Shape Carving: Smooth 3D Points and Normals for Surface Reconstruction

This paper proposes a method for reconstructing a smooth and accurate 3D surface. Recent machine vision techniques can reconstruct accurate 3D points and normals of an object. The reconstructed point cloud is used for generating its 3D surface by surface reconstruction. The more accurate the point cloud, the more correct the surface becomes. For improving the surface, how to integrate existing techniques for point reconstruction is proposed. Specifically, robust and dense reconstruction with Shape-from-Silhouettes (SfS) and accurate stereo reconstruction are integrated. Unlike gradual shape shrinking by space carving, our method obtains 3D points by SfS and stereo independently and accepts the correct points reconstructed. Experimental results show the improvement by our method.