3D Reconstruction by Fusioning Shadow and Silhouette Information

In this paper, we propose a new 3D reconstruction method using mainly the shadow and silhouette information of a moving object or person. This method is derived from the well-known Shape From Silhouettes (SFS) approach. A light source can be seen as a camera, which generates an image as a silhouette shadow. Based on this, we propose to replace a multicamera system of SFS by multi-infrared light sources while keeping the same procedure of Visual Hull reconstruction (VH). Therefore, our system consists of infrared light sources and one infrared camera. In this case, in addition to the object silhouette given by the camera, each light source generates an object shadow that reveals the object. Thus, as in SFS, the VH of a given object is reconstructed by intersecting the visual cones. Our method has many advantages compared to SFS and preliminary results, on synthetic and real scene images, showed that the system could be applied in several contexts.