Example-based 3D object reconstruction from line drawings

Recovering 3D geometry from a single 2D line drawing is an important and challenging problem in computer vision. It has wide applications in interactive 3D modeling from images, computer-aided design, and 3D object retrieval. Previous methods of 3D reconstruction from line drawings are mainly based on a set of heuristic rules. They are not robust to sketch errors and often fail for objects that do not satisfy the rules. In this paper, we propose a novel approach, called example-based 3D object reconstruction from line drawings, which is based on the observation that a natural or man-made complex 3D object normally consists of a set of basic 3D objects. Given a line drawing, a graphical model is built where each node denotes a basic object whose candidates are from a 3D model (example) database. The 3D reconstruction is solved using a maximum-a-posteriori (MAP) estimation such that the reconstructed result best fits the line drawing. Our experiments show that this approach achieves much better reconstruction accuracy and are more robust to imperfect line drawings than previous methods.