Design and Synthesis of Multiple View Volumetric 2D To 3D Reconstruction Technique and Its Application

Abstract

Today 3D is a buzz word in the entire multimedia and television industry. 3D reconstruction is an integral part of various applications in almost all disciplines. Few important applications of this field are 3D terrain rendering, virtual reality, robot navigation, augmented reality tasks, games, animations and motion pictures, industrial measurements, surface analysis, volumetric analysis, archeological and forensics applications. In medical field it is used in minimal invasive surgical techniques, 3D rendering of patients anatomy, computer guided surgeries, preoperative planning etc. The large variety of these interdisciplinary applications emphasizes the importance of 2D to 3D reconstruction. There are several attempts made by the researchers worldwide to reconstruct 3D shape of the object from multiple images. There is always a trade-off between computation speed, computation complexity, accuracy and feasibility in implementation of these methods/techniques. Consequently to bring more accuracy and quality in 3D reconstruction is still a challenging and open research problem. Stereo based reconstruction methods face challenges in reconstruction of the objects with very few features. Homography based approaches give accurate estimates yet do not provide system dynamics. Hence, these approaches are used in applications such as tennis referral systems where system dynamics is not important. On the other hand, voxel based volumetric reconstruction methods provide system dynamics which is essential for system modeling. These methods provide true essence of the object s volume. However, these approaches face challenges while modeling concavities. The dissertation presents a novel vision based mathematical model for combining homography estimation and voxel mapping approach for improving the accuracy of 3D reconstruction. The complete reconstruction pipeline of the proposed volumetric 2D to 3D reconstruction method/technique is presented with the experimental results.