Toward Flexible 3D Modeling using a Catadioptric Camera

Fully automatic 3D modeling from a catadioptric image sequence has rarely been addressed until now, although this is a long-standing problem for perspective images. All previous catadioptric approaches have been limited to dense reconstruction for a few view points, and the majority of them require calibration of the camera. This paper presents a method which deals with hundreds of images, and does not require precise calibration knowledge. In this context, the same 3D point of the scene may be visible and reconstructed in a large number of images at very different accuracies. So the main part of this paper concerns the selection of reconstructed points, a problem largely ignored in previous works. Summaries of the structure from motion and dense stereo steps are also given. Experiments include the 3D model reconstruction of indoor and outdoor scenes, and a walkthrough in a city.