Shape reconstruction and texture sampling by active rectification and virtual view synthesis

In this paper it is shown how to obtain a three-dimensional, textured object model by relying exclusively on image warping 2D–2D transformations. To achieve this goal, a dual (laser and natural light) illumination of the scene is exploited. Shape reconstruction is not based on triangulation, but on the planar rectification and collation of laser profiles. Texture sampling uses laser profile warping and compositing rather than 3D–2D model shape reprojection, so as to synthesize a virtual view of the object at hand, that is matched against the natural light sequence to obtain color data. Shape reconstruction and texture sampling are independent from each other, and can be run in parallel, thus speeding up the process. Moreover, the approach requires only a simple manual setup, and is effective with textured or textureless objects of any shape. Experimental results demonstrate that the approach combines the high accuracy of state-of-the-art active reconstruction methods with the flexibility of uncalibrated methods, improving on both. Specifically, avoiding any intermediate 3D measurement – in particular the external camera calibration parameters – has a dramatic impact on both model shape an texture accuracy, and also adds robustness w.r.t. any estimation errors of internal camera parameters.

Research highlights
► 3D visual reconstruction based solely on 2D warping transformations.
► Natural and laser light sequences are used.
► Object shape and texture are extracted through separate processes.
► A comparison with state-of-the-art methods is carried out.
► Results show that the approach is accurate, robust and flexible.