Robust and unbiased foreground / background energy for multi-view stereo

VISAPP is part of VISIGRAPP - International Joint Conference on Computer Vision, Imaging and Computer Graphics Theory and ApplicationsArea 3 - Motion, Tracking and Stereo Vision: Paper no. 13This paper revisits the graph-cuts based approach for solving the multi-view stereo problem, and proposes a novel foreground / background energy which is shown to be unbiased and robust against noisy depth maps. Unlike most existing works which focus on deriving a robust photo-consistency energy, this paper targets at deriving a robust and unbiased foreground / background energy. By introducing a novel data-dependent foreground / background energy, we show that it is possible to recover the object surface from noisy depth maps even in the absence of the photo-consistency energy. This demonstrates that the foreground / background energy is equally important as the photo-consistency energy in graph-cuts based methods. Experiments on real data sequences further show that high quality reconstructions can be achieved using our proposed foreground / background energy with a very simple photo-consistency energy.link_to_subscribed_fulltextThe International Joint Conference on Computer Vision Theory and Applications (VISAPP 2011), Vilamoura, Algarve, Portugal, 5-7 March 2011. In Proceedings of VISAPP, 2011, p. 451-45