Building three-dimensional object models from image sequences

We present the results from a working system designed to reconstruct a complete CAD/CAM surface model for objects that have both smooth and sharp surface boundaries. The input is a sequence of images of the object; the output is a 3-D surface mesh that can be manipulated and rendered with standard CAD/CAM tools. It is now well known that complete surface information (second-order differential surface properties) can be recovered at edges generated by the extremal boundary of a 3-D surface. In this paper we present new results in applying this theoretical framework to many views of a real object to build a complete 3-D model. Our experiments place these multiple frames in a common coordinate system using known motion, if available, or by otherwise automatically computing object motion based on our classification of edges in the reconstruction process. Experimental results are shown for both real and synthetic data.