Space carving MVD sequences for modeling natural 3D scenes

This paper presents a 3D modeling system designed for Multi-view Video plus Depth (MVD) sequences. The aim is to remove redundancy in both texture and depth information present in the MVD data. To this end, a volumetric framework is employed in order to merge the input depth maps. Hereby a variant of the Space Carving algorithm is proposed. Voxels are iteratively carved by ray-casting from each view, until the 3D model be geometrically consistent with every input depth map. A surface mesh is then extracted from this volumetric representation thanks to the Marching Cubes algorithm. Subsequently, to address the issue of texture modeling, a new algorithm for multi-texturing the resulting surface is presented. This algorithm selects from the set of input images the best texture candidate to map a given mesh triangle. The best texture is chosen according to a photoconsistency metric. Tests and results are provided using still images from usual MVD test-sequences.