What the Back of the Object Looks Like: 3D Reconstruction from Line Drawings without Hidden Lines

The human vision system can interpret a single 2D line drawing as a 3D object without much difficulty even if the hidden lines of the object are invisible. Many reconstruction methods have been proposed to emulate this ability, but they cannot recover the complete object if the hidden lines of the object are not shown. This paper proposes a novel approach to reconstructing a complete 3D object, including the shape of the back of the object, from a line drawing without hidden lines. First, we develop theoretical constraints and an algorithm for the inference of the topology of the invisible edges and vertices of an object. Then, we present a reconstruction method based on perceptual symmetry and planarity of the object. We show a number of examples to demonstrate the success of our approach.