Visual hull computation based on level set method

This paper presents a framework for robustly and accurately computing the visual hull of a real object from images sequences. Unlike most existing volumetric based approaches, level set deformable model is utilized in our system to drive the surface from a sphere smoothly recovery the shape of the real object. The algorithm represents the object's surface implicitly as the zero level set in uniform grid and the visual hull computation problem is translated into a forces computation problem. The deforming surface evolves under the internal and external forces according to the silhouettes and smoothness constrains. Snake deformable model is applied as a refinement step to improve the quality of mesh and reduce the total computing time. This classical and geometric mixed deformation model can easily and naturally changes the topology of the surface and need not add any extra measurement to avoid mesh confusion. The experiment results turns out that the final mesh have higher precise and smoothness than the traditional volumetric based approaches.