Facetwise Mesh Refinement for Multi-View Stereo

Mesh refinement is a fundamental step for accurate Multi-View Stereo. It modifies the geometry of an initial manifold mesh to minimize the photometric error induced in a set of camera pairs. This initial mesh is usually the output of volumetric 3D reconstruction based on min-cut over Delaunay Triangulations. Such methods produce a significant amount of non-manifold vertices, therefore they require a vertex split step to explicitly repair them. In this paper, we extend this method to preemptively fix the non-manifold vertices by reasoning directly on the Delaunay Triangulation and avoid most vertex splits. The main contribution of this paper addresses the problem of choosing the camera pairs adopted by the refinement process. We treat the problem as a mesh labeling process, where each label corresponds to a camera pair. Differently from the state-of-the-art methods, which use each camera pair to refine all the visible parts of the mesh, we choose, for each facet, the best pair that enforces both the overall visibility and coverage. The refinement step is applied for each facet using only the camera pair selected. This facetwise refinement helps the process to be applied in the most evenly way possible.Comment: Accepted as Oral ICPR202

Nonrigid reconstruction of 3D breast surfaces with a low-cost RGBD camera for surgical planning and aesthetic evaluation

Accounting for 26% of all new cancer cases worldwide, breast cancer remains the most common form of cancer in women. Although early breast cancer has a favourable long-term prognosis, roughly a third of patients suffer from a suboptimal aesthetic outcome despite breast conserving cancer treatment. Clinical-quality 3D modelling of the breast surface therefore assumes an increasingly important role in advancing treatment planning, prediction and evaluation of breast cosmesis. Yet, existing 3D torso scanners are expensive and either infrastructure-heavy or subject to motion artefacts. In this paper we employ a single consumer-grade RGBD camera with an ICP-based registration approach to jointly align all points from a sequence of depth images non-rigidly. Subtle body deformation due to postural sway and respiration is successfully mitigated leading to a higher geometric accuracy through regularised locally affine transformations. We present results from 6 clinical cases where our method compares well with the gold standard and outperforms a previous approach. We show that our method produces better reconstructions qualitatively by visual assessment and quantitatively by consistently obtaining lower landmark error scores and yielding more accurate breast volume estimates

Automatic 3d modeling of environments (a sparse approach from images taken by a catadioptric camera)

La modélisation 3d automatique d'un environnement à partir d'images est un sujet toujours d'actualité en vision par ordinateur. Ce problème se résout en général en trois temps : déplacer une caméra dans la scène pour prendre la séquence d'images, reconstruire la géométrie, et utiliser une méthode de stéréo dense pour obtenir une surface de la scène. La seconde étape met en correspondances des points d'intérêts dans les images puis estime simultanément les poses de la caméra et un nuage épars de points 3d de la scène correspondant aux points d'intérêts. La troisième étape utilise l'information sur l'ensemble des pixels pour reconstruire une surface de la scène, par exemple en estimant un nuage de points dense.Ici nous proposons de traiter le problème en calculant directement une surface à partir du nuage épars de points et de son information de visibilité fournis par l'estimation de la géométrie. Les avantages sont des faibles complexités en temps et en espace, ce qui est utile par exemple pour obtenir des modèles compacts de grands environnements comme une ville. Pour cela, nous présentons une méthode de reconstruction de surface du type sculpture dans une triangulation de Delaunay 3d des points reconstruits. L'information de visibilité est utilisée pour classer les tétraèdres en espace vide ou matière. Puis une surface est extraite de sorte à séparer au mieux ces tétraèdres à l'aide d'une méthode gloutonne et d'une minorité de points de Steiner. On impose sur la surface la contrainte de 2-variété pour permettre des traitements ultérieurs classiques tels que lissage, raffinement par optimisation de photo-consistance ... Cette méthode a ensuite été étendue au cas incrémental : à chaque nouvelle image clef sélectionnée dans une vidéo, de nouveaux points 3d et une nouvelle pose sont estimés, puis la surface est mise à jour. La complexité en temps est étudiée dans les deux cas (incrémental ou non). Dans les expériences, nous utilisons une caméra catadioptrique bas coût et obtenons des modèles 3d texturés pour des environnements complets incluant bâtiments, sol, végétation ... Un inconvénient de nos méthodes est que la reconstruction des éléments fins de la scène n'est pas correcte, par exemple les branches des arbres et les pylônes électriques.The automatic 3d modeling of an environment using images is still an active topic in Computer Vision. Standard methods have three steps : moving a camera in the environment to take an image sequence, reconstructing the geometry of the environment, and applying a dense stereo method to obtain a surface model of the environment. In the second step, interest points are detected and matched in images, then camera poses and a sparse cloud of 3d points corresponding to the interest points are simultaneously estimated. In the third step, all pixels of images are used to reconstruct a surface of the environment, e.g. by estimating a dense cloud of 3d points. Here we propose to generate a surface directly from the sparse point cloud and its visibility information provided by the geometry reconstruction step. The advantages are low time and space complexities ; this is useful e.g. for obtaining compact models of large and complete environments like a city. To do so, a surface reconstruction method by sculpting 3d Delaunay triangulation of the reconstructed points is proposed.The visibility information is used to classify the tetrahedra in free-space and matter. Then a surface is extracted thanks to a greedy method and a minority of Steiner points. The 2-manifold constraint is enforced on the surface to allow standard surface post-processing such as denoising, refinement by photo-consistency optimization ... This method is also extended to the incremental case : each time a new key-frame is selected in the input video, new 3d points and camera pose are estimated, then the reconstructed surface is updated.We study the time complexity in both cases (incremental or not). In experiments, a low-cost catadioptric camera is used to generate textured 3d models for complete environments including buildings, ground, vegetation ... A drawback of our methods is that thin scene components cannot be correctly reconstructed, e.g. tree branches and electric posts.CLERMONT FD-Bib.électronique (631139902) / SudocSudocFranceF

A Survey of Surface Reconstruction from Point Clouds

International audienceThe area of surface reconstruction has seen substantial progress in the past two decades. The traditional problem addressed by surface reconstruction is to recover the digital representation of a physical shape that has been scanned, where the scanned data contains a wide variety of defects. While much of the earlier work has been focused on reconstructing a piece-wise smooth representation of the original shape, recent work has taken on more specialized priors to address significantly challenging data imperfections, where the reconstruction can take on different representations – not necessarily the explicit geometry. We survey the field of surface reconstruction, and provide a categorization with respect to priors, data imperfections, and reconstruction output. By considering a holistic view of surface reconstruction, we show a detailed characterization of the field, highlight similarities between diverse reconstruction techniques, and provide directions for future work in surface reconstruction

FastMESH: Fast Surface Reconstruction by Hexagonal Mesh-based Neural Rendering

Despite the promising results of multi-view reconstruction, the recent neural rendering-based methods, such as implicit surface rendering (IDR) and volume rendering (NeuS), not only incur a heavy computational burden on training but also have the difficulties in disentangling the geometric and appearance. Although having achieved faster training speed than implicit representation and hash coding, the explicit voxel-based method obtains the inferior results on recovering surface. To address these challenges, we propose an effective mesh-based neural rendering approach, named FastMESH, which only samples at the intersection of ray and mesh. A coarse-to-fine scheme is introduced to efficiently extract the initial mesh by space carving. More importantly, we suggest a hexagonal mesh model to preserve surface regularity by constraining the second-order derivatives of vertices, where only low level of positional encoding is engaged for neural rendering. The experiments demonstrate that our approach achieves the state-of-the-art results on both reconstruction and novel view synthesis. Besides, we obtain 10-fold acceleration on training comparing to the implicit representation-based methods

TOWARD 3D RECONSTRUCTION OF STATIC AND DYNAMIC OBJECTS

The goal of image-based 3D reconstruction is to construct a spatial understanding of the world from a collection of images. For applications that seek to model generic real-world scenes, it is important that the reconstruction methods used are able to characterize both static scene elements (e.g. trees and buildings) as well as dynamic objects (e.g. cars and pedestrians). However, due to many inherent ambiguities in the reconstruction problem, recovering this 3D information with accuracy, robustness, and efficiency is a considerable challenge. To advance the research frontier for image-based 3D modeling, this dissertation focuses on three challenging problems in static scene and dynamic object reconstruction. We first target the problem of static scene depthmap estimation from crowd-sourced datasets (i.e. photos collected from the Internet). While achieving high-quality depthmaps using images taken under a controlled environment is already a difficult task, heterogeneous crowd-sourced data presents a unique set of challenges for multi-view depth estimation, including varying illumination and occasional occlusions. We propose a depthmap estimation method that demonstrates high accuracy, robustness, and scalability on a large number of photos collected from the Internet. Compared to static scene reconstruction, the problem of dynamic object reconstruction from monocular images is fundamentally ambiguous when not imposing any additional assumptions. This is because having only a single observation of an object is insufficient for valid 3D triangulation, which typically requires concurrent observations of the object from multiple viewpoints. Assuming that dynamic objects of the same class (e.g. all the pedestrians walking on a sidewalk) move in a common path in the real world, we develop a method that estimates the 3D positions of the dynamic objects from unstructured monocular images. Experiments on both synthetic and real datasets illustrate the solvability of the problem and the effectiveness of our approach. Finally, we address the problem of dynamic object reconstruction from a set of unsynchronized videos capturing the same dynamic event. This problem is of great interest because, due to the increased availability of portable capture devices, captures using multiple unsynchronized videos are common in the real world. To resolve the challenges that arises from non-concurrent captures and unknown temporal overlap among video streams, we propose a self-expressive dictionary learning framework, where the dictionary entries are defined as the collection of temporally varying structures. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach to the previously unsolved problem.Doctor of Philosoph

MONOCULAR POSE ESTIMATION AND SHAPE RECONSTRUCTION OF QUASI-ARTICULATED OBJECTS WITH CONSUMER DEPTH CAMERA

Quasi-articulated objects, such as human beings, are among the most commonly seen objects in our daily lives. Extensive research have been dedicated to 3D shape reconstruction and motion analysis for this type of objects for decades. A major motivation is their wide applications, such as in entertainment, surveillance and health care. Most of existing studies relied on one or more regular video cameras. In recent years, commodity depth sensors have become more and more widely available. The geometric measurements delivered by the depth sensors provide significantly valuable information for these tasks. In this dissertation, we propose three algorithms for monocular pose estimation and shape reconstruction of quasi-articulated objects using a single commodity depth sensor. These three algorithms achieve shape reconstruction with increasing levels of granularity and personalization. We then further develop a method for highly detailed shape reconstruction based on our pose estimation techniques. Our first algorithm takes advantage of a motion database acquired with an active marker-based motion capture system. This method combines pose detection through nearest neighbor search with pose refinement via non-rigid point cloud registration. It is capable of accommodating different body sizes and achieves more than twice higher accuracy compared to a previous state of the art on a publicly available dataset. The above algorithm performs frame by frame estimation and therefore is less prone to tracking failure. Nonetheless, it does not guarantee temporal consistent of the both the skeletal structure and the shape and could be problematic for some applications. To address this problem, we develop a real-time model-based approach for quasi-articulated pose and 3D shape estimation based on Iterative Closest Point (ICP) principal with several novel constraints that are critical for monocular scenario. In this algorithm, we further propose a novel method for automatic body size estimation that enables its capability to accommodate different subjects. Due to the local search nature, the ICP-based method could be trapped to local minima in the case of some complex and fast motions. To address this issue, we explore the potential of using statistical model for soft point correspondences association. Towards this end, we propose a unified framework based on Gaussian Mixture Model for joint pose and shape estimation of quasi-articulated objects. This method achieves state-of-the-art performance on various publicly available datasets. Based on our pose estimation techniques, we then develop a novel framework that achieves highly detailed shape reconstruction by only requiring the user to move naturally in front of a single depth sensor. Our experiments demonstrate reconstructed shapes with rich geometric details for various subjects with different apparels. Last but not the least, we explore the applicability of our method on two real-world applications. First of all, we combine our ICP-base method with cloth simulation techniques for Virtual Try-on. Our system delivers the first promising 3D-based virtual clothing system. Secondly, we explore the possibility to extend our pose estimation algorithms to assist physical therapist to identify their patients’ movement dysfunctions that are related to injuries. Our preliminary experiments have demonstrated promising results by comparison with the gold standard active marker-based commercial system. Throughout the dissertation, we develop various state-of-the-art algorithms for pose estimation and shape reconstruction of quasi-articulated objects by leveraging the geometric information from depth sensors. We also demonstrate their great potentials for different real-world applications

Learning Dense 3D Models from Monocular Video

Reconstructing dense, detailed, 3D shape of dynamic scenes from monocular sequences is a challenging problem in computer vision. While robust and even real-time solutions exist to this problem if the observed scene is static, for non-rigid dense shape capture current systems are typically restricted to the use of complex multi-camera rigs, taking advantage of the additional depth channel available in RGB-D cameras, or dealing with specific shapes such as faces or planar surfaces. In this thesis, we present two pieces of work for reconstructing dense generic shapes from monocular sequences. In the first work, we propose an unsupervised approach to the challenging problem of simultaneously segmenting the scene into its constituent objects and reconstructing a 3D model of the scene. The strength of our approach comes from the ability to deal with real-world dynamic scenes and to handle seamlessly different types of motion: rigid, articulated and non-rigid. We formulate the problem as a hierarchical graph-cuts based segmentation where we decompose the whole scene into background and foreground objects and model the complex motion of non-rigid or articulated objects as a set of overlapping rigid parts. To validate the capability of our approach to deal with real-world scenes, we provide 3D reconstructions of some challenging videos from the YouTube Objects and KITTI dataset, etc. In the second work, we propose a direct approach for capturing the dense, detailed 3D geometry of generic, complex non-rigid meshes using a single camera. Our method makes use of a single RGB video as input; it can capture the deformations of generic shapes; and the depth estimation is dense, per-pixel and direct. We first reconstruct a dense 3D template of the shape of the object, using a short rigid sequence, and subsequently perform online reconstruction of the non-rigid mesh as it evolves over time. In our experimental evaluation, we show a range of qualitative results on novel datasets and quantitative comparison results with stereo reconstruction