Interactive Camera Network Design using a Virtual Reality Interface

Traditional literature on camera network design focuses on constructing automated algorithms. These require problem specific input from experts in order to produce their output. The nature of the required input is highly unintuitive leading to an unpractical workflow for human operators. In this work we focus on developing a virtual reality user interface allowing human operators to manually design camera networks in an intuitive manner. From real world practical examples we conclude that the camera networks designed using this interface are highly competitive with, or superior to those generated by automated algorithms, but the associated workflow is much more intuitive and simple. The competitiveness of the human-generated camera networks is remarkable because the structure of the optimization problem is a well known combinatorial NP-hard problem. These results indicate that human operators can be used in challenging geometrical combinatorial optimization problems given an intuitive visualization of the problem.Comment: 11 pages, 8 figure

Predicting the Next Best View for 3D Mesh Refinement

3D reconstruction is a core task in many applications such as robot navigation or sites inspections. Finding the best poses to capture part of the scene is one of the most challenging topic that goes under the name of Next Best View. Recently, many volumetric methods have been proposed; they choose the Next Best View by reasoning over a 3D voxelized space and by finding which pose minimizes the uncertainty decoded into the voxels. Such methods are effective, but they do not scale well since the underlaying representation requires a huge amount of memory. In this paper we propose a novel mesh-based approach which focuses on the worst reconstructed region of the environment mesh. We define a photo-consistent index to evaluate the 3D mesh accuracy, and an energy function over the worst regions of the mesh which takes into account the mutual parallax with respect to the previous cameras, the angle of incidence of the viewing ray to the surface and the visibility of the region. We test our approach over a well known dataset and achieve state-of-the-art results.Comment: 13 pages, 5 figures, to be published in IAS-1