Reconstruction of the Visual Hull with Modified Ray-tracing and Fast Slice-based Surface Extraction

This paper presents a novel method for constructing a surface mesh from silhouettes estimated from image sequences. We implement a modified ray-tracing algorithm with an epipolar-line examination to obtain the surface vertices and investigate surface topology information by a slice-based surface extraction algorithm. In the ray tracing stage, a 2D-vector-based sandwich test is designed to predict the results of intersection, while culling only needs sequence calculations. Both theoretical analysis and experiment results show that our method is significantly faster than the original ray-tracing algorithm without losing accuracy.