Direct Optimization of T-Splines Based on Multiview Stereo

We propose a multi-view stereo reconstruction method in which the surface is represented by CAD-compatible T-splines. Our method hinges on the principle of is geometric analysis, formulating an energy functional that can be directly computed in terms of the T-spline basis. Paying attention to the idiosyncracies of this basis, we derive an analytic formula for the gradient of the functional which is then used in photo-consistency optimization. The numbers of degrees of freedom our model requires is drastically reduced compared to the state of the art. Gains in efficiency can firstly be attributed to the fact that T-splines are particularly suited for adaptive refinement. Secondly, evaluation of the proposed energy functional is highly parallelizable as demonstrated by means of a T-spline-specific GPU implementation. Our experiments indicate the superiority of T-spline surfaces over the widely-used triangular meshes in terms of memory efficiency and numerical stability, without relying on dedicated regularizers.