3-D surface recovery from range images by using multiresolution wavelet transform

In this paper, a surface recovery method using multiresolution wavelet transform is proposed. For representing 3-D surface shapes, 4th order B-spline functions are introduced as scaling functions of spline wavelets. A regularization problem is solved in order to estimate the surface function. The estimated surface function can be decomposed into an approximate surface function at specific lower resolution and the corresponding wavelet components by using the multiresolution wavelet transform. Consequently, by reducing the noise components which the wavelet components include, the surface recovery method can give a further accurate estimation of the surface function. Through several experiments, both the robustness to noises and the edge-preserving property in recovering the surface have been attained.