Anisotropic Range Image Integration

Obtaining high-quality 3D models of real world objects is an important task in computer vision. A very promising approach to achieve this is given by variational range image integration methods: They are able to deal with a substantial amount of noise and outliers, while regularising and thus creating smooth surfaces at the same time. Our paper extends the state-of-the-art approach of Zach et al. (2007) in several ways: (i) We replace the isotropic space-variant smoothing behaviour by an anisotropic (direction-dependent) one. Due to the directional adaptation, a better control of the smoothing with respect to the local structure of the signed distance field can be achieved. (ii) In order to keep data and smoothness term in balance, a normalisation factor is introduced. As a result, oversmoothing of locations that are seen seldom is prevented. This allows high quality reconstructions in uncontrolled capture setups, where the camera positions are unevenly distributed around an object. (iii) Finally, we use the more accurate closest signed distances instead of directional signed distances when converting range images into 3D signed distance fields. Experiments demonstrate that each of our three contributions leads to clearly visible improvements in the reconstruction quality.