Abstract
This paper presents a novel 3D reconstruction system for the famous Chinese treasure, Jadeite Cabbage with Insects, from uncalibrated image sequences. There are two major challenges for this 3D model reconstruction problem. The first is the difficult image registration problem due to the semi-diaphaneity and the highly specular property of jadeite materials. Secondly, the unknown camera information, including the intrinsic (calibration) and extrinsic (position and orientation) parameters, to be recovered from the uncalibrated image sequences makes the 3D reconstruction problem very challenging. The proposed 3D modeling process first recovers the camera information as well as sparse 3D structure by using a robust structure from motion algorithm. Then an approximate 3D object model is recovered from the silhouettes at the corresponding multiple views by using the visual hull technique. The final process refines the 3D model by further integrating the 3D information extracted from dense correspondences between image patches of different views. In the proposed 3D reconstruction system, we successfully combine the structure from motion and visual hull techniques to accomplish this challenging task of reconstructing an accurate 3D model for jadeite object from uncalibrated multi-view images. Finally, we assess the 3D reconstruction results for the Chinese jadeite treasure and simulated data by using the proposed 3D reconstruction system. © 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.