DreamWorld: CUDA-accelerated real-time 3D modeling system

3D modeling plays an important role in virtual reality interaction, immersive tele-presence and other applications. A CUDA-accelerated real-time 3D modeling system is presented in this paper. It captures multi-view images of objects and achieves real-time accurate visual hull reconstruction with texture mapping. The system includes off-line camera calibration and on-line visual hull modeling based on our DreamWorld hardware. The multi-camera based modeling process is composed of distributed image acquisition, silhouette extraction, data transmission, visual hull computation and rendering. Initially, the volumetric visual hull is computed through intersection test of voxels with each silhouette and then, a CUDA-based simplified exact marching cubes algorithm is put forward to get a polyhedral mesh model for texture mapping and rendering. Preliminary experimental results from both synthetic and real data show its accuracy, stability and real-time performance.