Extracting Surface Representations from Rim Curves

In this paper, we design and implement a novel method for constructing a mixed triangle/quadrangle mesh from the 3D space curves (rims) estimated from the profiles of an object in an image sequence without knowing the original 3D topology of the object. To this aim, a contour data structure for representing visual hull, which is different from that for CT/MRI, is introduced. In this paper, we (1) solve the “branching structure” problem by introducing some additional “directed edge”, and (2) extract a triangle/quadrangle closed mesh from the contour structure with an algorithm based on dynamic programming. Both theoretical demonstration and real world results show that our proposed method has sufficient robustness with respect to the complex topology of the object, and the extracted mesh is of high quality.