A Comprehensive Tool for Recovering 3D Models From 2D Photos With Wide Baselines

Abstract

Recovering 3D objects from 2D photos is an important application in the areas of computer vision, computer intelligence, feature recognition, and virtual reality. This paper describes an innovative and systematic method that integrates automatic feature extraction, automatic feature matching, manual revision, feature recovery, and model reconstruction into an effective and integrated 3D object recovery tool. The proposed method is a convenient and inexpensive way to recover 3D scenes and models directly from 2D photos. New automatic key-point selection and hierarchical matching algorithms were developed for matching 2D photos with wide baselines. The method uses a universal camera intrinsic matrix estimation technique to eliminate the need for camera calibration experiments. A new automatic texture-mapping algorithm was also developed for finding the best textures in 2D photos. The paper includes some examples and results to show the capabilities of the new method.