Shadow multiplexing for single camera visual hull reconstruction

Abstract

In this work we propose a technique for efficient extraction of multiviewpoint silhouettes using a single camera. To achieve this, we replace the cameras of a typical multi-camera setup with light sources and capture the multiplexed cast shadows. Because we only use a single camera, our setup is much cheaper than a classical setup, no camera synchronization is required, and less data has to be captured and processed. In addition, silhouette extraction is easy and robust, as we are segmenting the cast shadows instead of the background and objects' texture information. We evaluate our method on both a real and a virtual setup, and show that our technique works for a large variety of objects and materials.