Fast Computation of a Visual Hull

Two techniques for the fast computation of a visual hull without simplification are proposed. First, we tackle the most time consuming step for finding the intersections between projected rays and silhouette boundaries. We use the chain coding representation of silhouette boundaries for fast searching and computing with sub-pixel accuracy. Second, we analyze 3D-2D projection and back-projection relations and formulate them as 1D homographies. This formulation reduces computational cost and ambiguity that can be caused by measurement errors in the back-projection of 2D intersections to 3D. Furthermore, we show that the formulation is not limited to the projective space but also useful in the affine space. We generalize our techniques to an arbitrary 3D ray, so that the proposed method is directly applicable to both volume-based and surface-based visual hull methods. In our simulations, we compare the proposed algorithm with the state-of-the-art methods and show its advantages in terms of computational cost.

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