Topology-based automatic 3D modeling from multiple images

3D reconstruction from multiple-view images has drawn a lot of attentions in computer graphics and computer vision communities. Traditional techniques usually end at discrete 3D point clouds computed from feature correspondence. However, geometric structure remains ambiguous in these unstructured point clouds, especially for man-made objects like buildings, indoor scenes. This paper proposes a new method to automatically reconstruct the main geometric structure of the scene composed of planar faces. First, dense 3D point clouds are reconstructed by applying patch-based multi-view stereo (PMVS) algorithm [1]. Then 3D planar primitives are extracted using a RANSAC-based approach [2]. We present a novel method to analyze the adjacency relations of the planar primitives to estimate the 3D intersection lines on the corresponding faces. Junctions and polygonal faces are computed from the 3D intersection lines along with complementary image information to compose the topology structure. Finally, texture for each face is extracted from the image under the best view. Experimental results demonstrate the feasibility of our system by successfully reconstructing the main structure of a wide range of scenes and constructing a texture-mapped piecewise-planar 3D model from images in multiple views.