Determining characteristic views of a 3D object by visual hulls and Hausdorff distance

Nowadays, with the exponential growing of 3D object representations in private databases or on the web, it is all the more required to match these objects from some views. To improve the results of their matching, we work on the characteristic views of an object. The aim of this study is to find how many characteristic views are required and what relative positions are optimal. This is the reason why the visual hulls are used. From some 2D masks, the nearest possible 3D mesh from the original object is computed. OpenGL views are used to build the visual hulls of 3D models from a given collection and then the distance between the visual hulls and the models are measured thanks to the Hausdorff distance. Then the best view parameters are deduced to reduce the distance. These shots show that three orthogonal views give results very close to the ones given by twelve views on a isocahedron. Some other results on the view resolution and the field of view are discussed.