Spacetime-continuous geometry meshes from multi-view video sequences

We reconstruct geometry for a time-varying scene given by a number of video sequences. The dynamic geometry is represented by a 3D hypersurface embedded in space-time. The intersection of the hypersurface with planes of constant time then yields the geometry at a single time instant. In this paper, we model the hypersurface with a collection of triangle meshes, one for each time frame. The photo-consistency error is measured by an error functional defined as an integral over the hypersurface. It can be minimized using a PDE driven surface evolution, which simultaneously optimizes space-time continuity as well. Compared to our previous implementation based on level sets, triangle meshes yield more accurate results, while requiring less memory and computation time. Meshes are also directly compatible with triangle-based rendering algorithms, so no additional post-processing is required.