Multiperspective stereo matching and volumetric reconstruction

Stereo matching and volumetric reconstruction are the most explored 3D scene recovery techniques in computer vision. Many existing approaches assume perspective input images and use the epipolar constraint to reduce the search space and improve the accuracy. In this paper we present a novel framework that uses multi-perspective cameras for stereo matching and volumetric reconstruction. Our approach first decomposes a multi-perspective camera into piecewise primitive General Linear Cameras or GLCs. A pair of GLCs in general do not satisfy the epipolar constraint. However, they still form a nearly stereo pair. We develop a new Graph-Cut-based algorithm to account for the slight vertical parallax using the GLC ray geometry. We show that the recovered pseudo disparity map conveys important depth cues analogous to perspective stereo matching. To more accurately reconstruct a 3D scene, we develop a new multi-perspective volumetric reconstruction method. We discretize the scene into voxels and apply the GLC back-projections to map the voxel onto each input multi-perspective camera. Finally, we apply the graph-cut algorithm to optimize the 3D embedded voxel graph. We demonstrate our algorithms on both synthetic and real multi-perspective cameras. Experimental results show that our methods are robust and reliable.