Quantification of gaseous structures with volumetric reconstruction from visual hulls

3D reconstruction from visual hulls is a well established technique for camera based reconstruction of 3D objects in computer graphics. We propose in this paper to employ visual hull techniques to quantify the volume of diffusely defined gaseous structures. In our evaluation, visual quality of the 3D reconstructions is secondary. Instead, using synthetic ground truth data, we determine the number of independent silhouette images needed to achieve a stable volume estimate. We also estimate the influence of different segmentation results of the silhouette images on final volume estimates. Our results show that comparably few camera views yield to convergent volume estimates. For the type of 3D data studied, visual hull reconstructions overestimate actual volumes with about 50%. This proportion seems to be consistent for different data sets tested and may serve for re-calibration of volume estimation of gaseous structures.