On three-dimensional surface reconstruction methods

A survey is presented of some of the surface reconstruction methods that can be found in the literature; the focus is on a small, recent, and important subset of the published reconstruction techniques. The techniques are classified based on the surface representation used, implicit versus explicit functions. A study is made of the important aspects of the surface reconstruction techniques. One aspect is the viewpoint invariance of the methods. This is an important property if object recognition is the ultimate objective. The robustness of the various methods is examined. It is determined whether the parameter estimates are biased, and the sensitivity to obscuration is addressed. The latter two aspects are particularly important for fitting functions in the implicit form. A detailed description is given of a parametric reconstruction method for three-dimensional object surfaces that involves numeric grid generation techniques and variational principle formulations. This technique is invariant to rigid motion in dimensional space