Multiview stereo via volumetric graph-cuts and occlusion robust photo-consistency

This paper presents a volumetric formulation for the multiview stereo problem which is amenable to a computationally tractable global optimization using Graph-cuts. Our approach is to seek the optimal partitioning of 3D space into two regions labeled as "object" and "empty" under a cost functional consisting of the following two terms: 1) A term that forces the boundary between the two regions to pass through photo-consistent locations and 2) a ballooning term that inflates the "object" region. To take account of the effect of occlusion on the first term, we use an occlusion robust photo-consistency metric based on Normalized Cross Correlation, which does not assume any geometric knowledge about the reconstructed object. The globally optimal 3D partitioning can be obtained as the minimum cut solution of a weighted graph.