Segment-Based Foreground Extraction Dedicated to 3D Reconstruction

Researches of image-based 3D reconstruction have recently produced a number of good results, but they assume that the accurate foreground to be reconstructed is already extracted from each input image. This paper proposes a novel approach to extract more accurate foregrounds by iteratively performing foreground extraction and 3D reconstruction in a manner similar to an EM algorithm on regions segmented in an initial stage, called segments. After definitively extracting the foregrounds in multi-views based on simply selecting segments corresponding to the real foreground in only one image, further improved foregrounds are extracted by back-projecting 3D objects reconstructed based on the foreground extracted in the previous step into segments of each image in multi-views. These two steps are iteratively performed until the energy function is optimized. In the experiments, more accurate boundaries were obtained, although the proposed method used a simple 3D reconstruction method.