We address the problem of epipolar geometry using the motion of silhouettes. Such methods match epipolar lines or frontier points across views, which are then used as the set of putative correspondences. We introduce an approach that improves by two orders of magnitude the performance over state-of-the-art methods, by significantly reducing the number of outliers in the putative matching. We model the frontier points' correspondence problem as constrained flow optimization, requiring small differences between their coordinates over consecutive frames. Our approach is formulated as a Linear Integer Program and we show that due to the nature of our problem, it can be solved efficiently in an iterative manner. Our method was validated on four standard datasets providing accurate calibrations across very different viewpoints.
The most common uses of silhouettes in multi-camera systems are for shape-from-silhouettes @cite_4 @cite_36 @cite_29 and camera calibration @cite_30 @cite_8 @cite_18 @cite_10 @cite_7 . In shape-from-silhouettes, the goal is to recover the visual hull @cite_11 @cite_20 of the object. In calibration, it is assumed that the motion of the silhouette is fully observed across different views. Correspondences are established between frontier points across different views based on the epipolar tangency constraints @cite_38 and are then used to compute the epipolar geometry. Most methods require a specific configuration that cannot be applied in a general setting, which is considered here. These include calibrated cameras, static objects, orthographic projection models, or known (turntable) motion @cite_33 @cite_37 @cite_22 @cite_3 @cite_30 . Calibration can be carried out without explicitly finding the corresponding tangent epipolar lines, such as in @cite_18 @cite_31 . These methods require a good initial guess to converge.
@cite_30 @cite_38 @cite_18 @cite_37 @cite_4 @cite_33 @cite_7 @cite_8 @cite_36 @cite_22 @cite_29 @cite_3 @cite_31 @cite_10 @cite_20 @cite_11
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We present a new approach to camera calibration as a part of a complete and practical system to recover digital copies of sculpture from uncalibrated image sequences taken under turntable motion. In this paper, we introduce the concept of the silhouette coherence of a set of silhouettes generated by a 3D object. We show how the maximization of the silhouette coherence can be exploited to recover the camera poses and focal length. Silhouette coherence can be considered as a generalization of the well-known epipolar tangency constraint for calculating motion from silhouettes or outlines alone. Further, silhouette coherence exploits all the geometric information encoded in the silhouette (not just at epipolar tangency points) and can be used in many practical situations where point correspondences or outer epipolar tangents are unavailable. We present an algorithm for exploiting silhouette coherence to efficiently and reliably estimate camera motion. We use this algorithm to reconstruct very high quality 3D models from uncalibrated circular motion sequences, even when epipolar tangency points are not available or the silhouettes are truncated. The algorithm has been integrated into a practical system and has been tested on more than 50 uncalibrated sequences to produce high quality photo-realistic models. Three illustrative examples are included in this paper. The algorithm is also evaluated quantitatively by comparing it to a state-of-the-art system that exploits only epipolar tangents This paper addresses the problem of recovering both the intrinsic and extrinsic parameters of a camera from the silhouettes of an object in a turntable sequence. Previous silhouette-based approaches have exploited correspondences induced by epipolar tangents to estimate the image invariants under turntable motion and achieved a weak calibration of the cameras. It is known that the fundamental matrix relating any two views in a turntable sequence can be expressed explicitly in terms of the image invariants, the rotation angle, and a fixed scalar. It will be shown that the imaged circular points for the turntable plane can also be formulated in terms of the same image invariants and fixed scalar. This allows the imaged circular points to be recovered directly from the estimated image invariants, and provide constraints for the estimation of the imaged absolute conic. The camera calibration matrix can thus be recovered. A robust method for estimating the fixed scalar from image triplets is introduced, and a method for recovering the rotation angles using the estimated imaged circular points and epipoles is presented. Using the estimated camera intrinsics and extrinsics, a Euclidean reconstruction can be obtained. Experimental results on real data sequences are presented, which demonstrate the high precision achieved by the proposed method. In this paper we present an automatic method for calibrating a network of cameras that works by analyzing only the motion of silhouettes in the multiple video streams. This is particularly useful for automatic reconstruction of a dynamic event using a camera network in a situation where pre-calibration of the cameras is impractical or even impossible. The key contribution of this work is a RANSAC-based algorithm that simultaneously computes the epipolar geometry and synchronization of a pair of cameras only from the motion of silhouettes in video. Our approach involves first independently computing the fundamental matrix and synchronization for multiple pairs of cameras in the network. In the next stage the calibration and synchronization for the complete network is recovered from the pairwise information. Finally, a visual-hull algorithm is used to reconstruct the shape of the dynamic object from its silhouettes in video. For unsynchronized video streams with sub-frame temporal offsets, we interpolate silhouettes between successive frames to get more accurate visual hulls. We show the effectiveness of our method by remotely calibrating several different indoor camera networks from archived video streams. We propose a probabilistic formulation of joint silhouette extraction and 3D reconstruction given a series of calibrated 2D images. Instead of segmenting each image separately in order to construct a 3D surface consistent with the estimated silhouettes, we compute the most probable 3D shape that gives rise to the observed color information. The probabilistic framework, based on Bayesian inference, enables robust 3D reconstruction by optimally taking into account the contribution of all views. We solve the arising maximum a posteriori shape inference in a globally optimal manner by convex relaxation techniques in a spatially continuous representation. For an interactively provided user input in the form of scribbles specifying foreground and background regions, we build corresponding color distributions as multivariate Gaussians and find a volume occupancy that best fits to this data in a variational sense. Compared to classical methods for silhouette-based multiview reconstruction, the proposed approach does not depend on initialization and enjoys significant resilience to violations of the model assumptions due to background clutter, specular reflections, and camera sensor perturbations. In experiments on several real-world data sets, we show that exploiting a silhouette coherency criterion in a multiview setting allows for dramatic improvements of silhouette quality over independent 2D segmentations without any significant increase of computational efforts. This results in more accurate visual hull estimation, needed by a multitude of image-based modeling approaches. We made use of recent advances in parallel computing with a GPU implementation of the proposed method generating reconstructions on volume grids of more than 20 million voxels in up to 4.41 seconds.