3D model refinement using surface-parallax

We present an approach to update and refine coarse 3D models of urban environments from a sequence of intensity images using surface parallax. This generalizes the plane-parallax recovery methods to surface-parallax using arbitrary surfaces. A coarse and potentially incomplete depth map of the scene obtained from a digital elevation map (DEM) is used as a reference surface which is refined and updated using this approach. The reference depth map is used to estimate the camera motion and the motion of the 3D points on the reference surface is compensated. The resulting parallax, which is an epipolar field, is estimated using an adaptive windowing technique and used to obtain the refined depth map.