Efficient Polyhedral Modeling from Silhouettes

Modeling from silhouettes is a popular and useful topic in computer vision. Many methods exist to compute the surface of the visual hull from silhouettes, but few address the problem of ensuring good topological properties of the surface, such as manifoldness. This article provides an efficient algorithm to compute such a surface in the form of a polyhedral mesh. It relies on a small number of geometric operations to compute a visual hull polyhedron in a single pass. Such simplicity enables the algorithm to combine the advantages of being fast, producing pixel-exact surfaces, and repeatably yield manifold and watertight polyhedra in general experimental conditions with real data, as verified with all datasets tested. The algorithm is fully described, its complexity analyzed and modeling results given.