Three-Dimensional Scene Reconstruction: A Review of Approaches

The production of 3D models has been a popular research topic already for a long time, and important progress has been made since the early days. During the last decades, vision systems have established to become the standard and one of the most efficient sensorial assets in industrial and everyday applications. Due to the fact that vision provides several vital attributes, many applications tend to use novel vision systems into domestic, working, industrial, and any other environments. To achieve such goals, a vision system should robustly and effectively reconstruct the 3D surface and the working space. This chapter discusses different methods for capturing the three-dimensional surface of a scene. Geometric approaches to three-dimensional scene reconstruction are generally based on the knowledge of the scene structure from the camera’s internal and external parameters. Another class of methods encompasses the photometric approaches, which evaluate the pixels’ intensity to understand the three-dimensional scene structure. The third and final category of approaches, the so-called real aperture approaches, includes methods that use the physical properties of the visual sensors for image acquisition in order to reproduce the depth information of a scene. DOI: 10.4018/978-1-61350-326-3.ch008