Combining Multiple Texture Mappings Using Surface Flattening

In this paper we present a novel method to combine partial texture mappings of arbitrary surfaces by using surface flattening. Partial texture maps can be obtained from optical images of an object acquired from different viewpoints. Combining optical images into a complete texture map that covers the entire object is not trivial. Surface flattening preserves the structure of a 3D mesh and converts it into the 2D space. Optical images can be converted to flattening based surface maps that can be merged based on the structure of the mesh. This paper describes the flattening and the merging methods and shows results on synthetic and real data.