Model-based multiview stereo via level sets with statistical shape prior

In this paper, we propose a methodology to incorporate 3D shape prior information in multi-view stereo. This is important for applications that deal with specific category of objects. The methodology is based on a new formulation of a level-set based energy functional. Shape prior model is then embedded in the energy functional to allow the reconstruction of an object with shape variations consistent with the training model examples. Several experiments to evaluate the proposed methodology are presented.