Contour-Based Structure from Reflection

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a novel contour-based algorithm for 3D object reconstruction from a single uncalibrated image acquired under the setting of two plane mirrors. With the epipolar geometry recovered from the image and the properties of mirror reflection, metric reconstruction of an arbitrary rigid object is accomplished without knowing the camera parameters and the mirror poses. For this mirror setup, the epipoles can be estimated from the correspondences between the object and its reflection, which can be established automatically from the tangent lines of their contours. By using the property of mirror reflection as well as the relationship between the mirror plane normal with the epipole and camera intrinsic, we can estimate the camera intrinsic, plane normals and the orientation of virtual cameras. The positions of the virtual cameras are determined by minimizing the distance between the object contours and the projected visual cone for a reference view. After the camera parameters are determined, the 3D object model is constructed via the image-based visual hulls (IBVH) technique. The 3D model can be refined by integrating the multiple models reconstructed from different views. The main advantage of the proposed contour-based Structure from Reflection (SfR) algorithm is that it can achieve metric reconstruction from an uncalibrated image without feature point correspondences. Experimental results on synthetic and real images are presented to show its performance.