Shape Recovery of a Strictly Convex Solid from N-views

In this paper we consider the problem of extracting the shape of a smooth convex solid, V ⊂ R, from a set of N photographs. The method begins by extracting the edges of each photograph. These edges are used to form a cone whose apex is the camera centre, which is guaranteed to enclose V . For a strictly convex solid any two such cones will most likely touch at two places [3], whose coordinates then give two data points which lie on V along with the orientation of the surface at these points. A set of cameras observing V yields a cloud of such points and normals. A new type of implicit surface is fitted to both the points and their normals. The implicit surface has the property of minimising a linear combination of first, second and third order energies, as in [5], but with the added refinement of incorporating information about the surface orientation at each constraint point. ∗With partial funding from The Western Australian Interactive Virtual Environments Centre. †With partial funding from The Alexander von Humbolt Foundation. 2