Reconstructing complex surfaces from multiple stereo views

We present a framework for 3D surface reconstruction that can be used to model fully 3 dimensional scenes from an arbitrary number of stereo views. Taken from vastly different viewpoints. This is a key step toward producing 3D world descriptions of complex scenes using stereo and is a very challenging problem: real world scenes tend to contain many 3D objects, they do not usually conform to the 2-1/2D assumption made by traditional algorithms, and one cannot take it for granted that the computed 3D points can easily be clustered into separate groups. By combining a particle based representation, robust fitting, and optimization of an image based objective function, we have been able to reconstruct surfaces without any a priori knowledge of their topology and in spite of the noisiness of the stereo data. Our current implementation goes through three steps-initializing a set of particles from the input 3D data, optimizing their location, and finally grouping them into global surfaces. Using several complex scenes containing multiple objects, we demonstrate its competence and ability to merge information and thus to go beyond what can be done with conventional stereo alone.<<ETX>>