Marching intersections: an efficient approach to shape-from-silhouette

A new shape-from-silhouette algorithm for the creation of 3D digital models is presented. The algorithm is based on the use of the Marching Intersection (MI) data structure, a volumetric scheme which allows efficient representation of 3D polyhedra and reduces the boolean operations between them to simple boolean operations on linear intervals. MI supports the definition of a direct shapefrom-silhouette approach: the 3D conoids built from the silhouettes extracted from the images of the object are directly intersected to form the resulting 3D digital model. Compared to existing methods, our approach allows high quality models to be obtained in an efficient way. Examples on synthetic objects together with quantitative and qualitative evaluations are given.