Fast and Controllable 3D Modelling From Silhouettes

We show how a 3D model of a complex curved object can be easily extracted from a single 2D image. A userdefined silhouette is the key input; and we show that finding the smoothest 3D surface which projects exactly to this silhouette can be expressed as a quadratic optimization, a result which has not previously appeared in the large literature on the shape-from-silhouette problem. For simple models, this process can immediately yield a usable 3D model; but for more complex geometries the user will wish to further shape the surface. We show that a variety of editing operations—which can be defined either in the image or in 3D—can also be expressed as linear constraints on the 3D shape parameters. We extend the system to fit higher genus surfaces. Our method has several advantages over the system of Zhang et al. [ZDPSS01] and over systems such as SKETCH and Teddy.