Multiview stereo object reconstruction with a one-line search method

We propse the one-line search (OLS) method for estimating the three-dimensional (3-D) model of an object from a sequence of images where the object is visible from different points of view. The OLS method estimates each 3-D point through a OLS along the ray defined by the camera center and its two-dimensional (2-D) image projection in one view by maximizing a photo-consistency index built with the other views. The key advantage of the proposed method is that only one variable is introduced for estimating the sought 3-D point, whereas approaches for multiview stereo typically exploit multiple epipolar lines and hence require multiple variables. Results with both synthetic and real data illustrate and validate the proposed method. © 2013 SPIE and IS&T [DOI: 10.1117/1.JEI.22.2.023019]