Robust dense reconstruction by range merging based on confidence estimation

Although the stereo matching problem has been extensively studied during the past decades, automatically computing a dense 3D reconstruction from several multiple views is still a difficult task owing to the problems of textureless regions, outliers, detail loss, and various other factors. In this paper, these difficult problems are handled effectively by a robust model that outputs an accurate and dense reconstruction as the final result from an input of multiple images captured by a normal camera. First, the positions of the camera and sparse 3D points are estimated by a structure-from-motion algorithm and we compute the range map with a confidence estimation for each image in our approach. Then all the range maps are integrated into a fine point cloud data set. In the final step we use a Poisson reconstruction algorithm to finish the reconstruction. The major contributions of the work lie in the following points: effective range-computation and confidence-estimation methods are proposed to handle the problems of textureless regions, outliers and detail loss. Then, the range maps are merged into the point cloud data in terms of a confidence-estimation. Finally, Poisson reconstruction algorithm completes the dense mesh. In addition, texture mapping is also implemented as a post-processing work for obtaining good visual effects. Experimental results are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.