Section: Research Program

Visual Reconstruction With Multiple Color and Depth Cameras

For the last decade, one of the most active topics in computer vision has been the visual reconstruction of objects, people, and complex scenes using a multiple-camera setup. The PERCEPTION team has pioneered this field and by 2006 several team members published seminal papers in the field. Recent work has concentrated onto the robustness of the 3D reconstructed data using probabilistic outlier rejection techniques combined with algebraic geometry principles and linear algebra solvers [23]. Subsequently, we proposed to combine 3D representations of shape (meshes) with photometric data [21]. The originality of this work was to represent photometric information as a scalar function over a discrete Riemannian manifold, thus generalizing image analysis to mesh and graph analysis. Manifold equivalents of local-structure detectors and descriptors were developed [22]. The outcome of this pioneering work has been twofold: the formulation of a new research topic now addressed by several teams in the world, and allowed us to start a three year collaboration with Samsung Electronics. We developed the novel concept of mixed camera systems combining high-resolution color cameras with low-resolution depth cameras [14], [10],[9]. Together with our start-up company 4D Views Solutions and with Samsung, we developed the first practical depth-color multiple-camera multiple-PC system and the first algorithms to reconstruct high-quality 3D content [8].