Scene reconstruction from rays application to stereo data

The problem of reconstructing shapes of objects from sparse measurements such as points on the boundary of an object is considered. In most situations, the points are the endpoints of a curve or a ray which does not cross the objects. For example, if the sensor is an optical device, the ray is the straight line (the optical ray) joining the camera center to the point. It is shown that the information provided by rays is crucial when determining the shapes of objects, and nonheuristic reconstruction methods in 2-D and 3-D space are described. An efficient method is derived for the reconstruction of surfaces from 3-D segments provided by a stereo vision process