Diploma Thesis from the year 2006 in the subject Communications -
Research, Studies, Enquiries, grade: 1, University of Weimar, language:
English, abstract: Reconstruction of real-world scenes from a set of
multiple images is a topic in Computer Vision and 3D Computer Graphics
with many interesting applications. There exists a powerful algorithm
for shape reconstruction from arbitrary viewpoints, called Space
Carving. However, it is computationally expensive and hence can not be
used with applications in the field of 3D video or CSCW as well as
interactive 3D model creation. Attempts have been made to achieve
real-time framerates using PC cluster systems. While these provide
enough performance they are also expensive and less flexible. Approaches
that use GPU hardware acceleration on single workstations achieve
interactive framerates for novel-view synthesis, but do not provide an
explicit volumetric representation of the whole scene. The proposed
approach shows the efforts in developing a GPU hardware-accelerated
framework for obtaining the volumetric photo hull of a dynamic 3D scene
as seen from multiple calibrated cameras. High performance is achieved
by employing a shape from silhouette technique in advance to obtain a
tight initial volume for Space Carving. Also several speed-up techniques
are presented to increase efficiency. Since the entire processing is
done on a single PC the framework can be applied to mobile setups,
enabling a wide range of further applications. The approach is explained
using programmable vertex and fragment processors with current hardware
and compared to highly optimized CPU implementations. It is shown that
the new approach can outperform the latter by more than one magnitude.
The downloadable introduction has been written specifically for this
offer. Its contents are only a subset of the real introductory chapter
of the thesis.
