Camera viewpoint control for the automatic reconstruction of 3D objects

An algorithm for the image dependent control of the camera viewpoint is presented, which is applied to the automatic reconstruction of 3D objects. For computer animation applications, "shape from silhouettes" using equally distributed viewpoints is an often used reconstruction technique. With respect to the local reconstruction errors, the use of equally distributed camera views is unfavourable for arbitrary shaped objects. For that reason, a camera viewpoint control is introduced, which purposefully rotates a turntable with the 3D object depending on the trace of the silhouette contour points over the rotation angle. This trace provides information about the location of object planes and gives a measure for the expected local 3D reconstruction errors. It turns out, that the new algorithm reduces the remaining 3D reconstruction errors up to 70% compared to algorithms without viewpoint control using the same number of viewpoints.