3D Scanning Using Spatiotemporal Orientation

We present a new approach to volumetric scene reconstruction which can produce accurate models from turntable image sequences. Instead of an epipolar plane image (EPI) volume, we consider a function on the 4D spatiotemporal volume valued with the intensity back projection of the camera (time) to the particular voxel. Using an optical flow technique we compute the local orientation of this spatiotemporal image and decide on occupancy based on the relative orientation between the viewing ray of the voxel at the particular time and the local image structure. Our method does not require a background compensation like the silhouette-based methods and is comparable in performance with space carving. The visual quality in rendering of the established model is dramatically increased by using the number of occupancy candidates for a voxel along all cameras as a transparency measure.