A probabilistic framework for surface reconstruction from multiple images

The paper presents a novel probabilistic framework for 3D surface reconstruction from multiple stereo images. The method works on a discrete voxelized representation of the scene. An iterative scheme is used to estimate the probability that a scene point lies on the true 3D surface. The novelty of our approach lies in the ability to model and recover surfaces which may be occluded in some views. This is done by explicitly estimating the probabilities that a 3D scene point is visible in a particular view from the set of given images. This relies on the fact that for a point on a lambertian surface, if the pixel intensities of its projection along two views differ, then the point is necessarily occluded in one of the views. We present results of surface reconstruction from both real and synthetic image sets.