Incremental procedure for recovering entire building shape from close range images

This paper describes a method for recovering entire 3D shape of a building from an image sequence. This is a kind of “Shape and Motion recovery” problem in the computer vision field, whereas the conventional methods do not work well with the images taken around a large object in the near distance. Since such image sequence is a set of partial observations, the problem of 3D recovery becomes unstable. We first discuss the property of the local minima of the nonlinear optimization function, and then describe an incremental procedure to find the global minimum by avoiding the pseudo solutions. Experiments using the real images have shown that the proposed method successfully recovered the 3D shapes from eleven sets of image sequences.