Continuous ratio optimization via convex relaxation with applications to multiview 3D reconstruction

We introduce a convex relaxation framework to optimally minimize continuous surface ratios. The key idea is to minimize the continuous surface ratio by solving a sequence of convex optimization problems. We show that such minimal ratios are superior to traditionally used minimal surface formulations in that they do not suffer from a shrinking bias and no longer require the choice of a regularity parameter. The absence of a shrinking bias in the minimal ratio model is proven analytically. Furthermore we demonstrate that continuous ratio optimization can be applied to derive a new algorithm for reconstructing three-dimensional silhouette-consistent objects from multiple views. Experimental results confirm that our approach allows to accurately reconstruct deep concavities even without the specification of tuning parameters.