3D Modeling from Wide Baseline Range Scans using Contour Coherence

Ruizhe Wang, Jongmoo Choi, Gerard Medioni; Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2014, pp. 4018-4025

Registering 2 or more range scans is a fundamental problem, with application to 3D modeling. While this problem is well addressed by existing techniques such as ICP when the views overlap significantly at a good initialization, no satisfactory solution exists for wide baseline registration. We propose here a novel approach which leverages contour coherence and allows us to align two wide baseline range scans with limited overlap from a poor initialization. Inspired by ICP, we maximize the contour coherence by building robust corresponding pairs on apparent contours and minimizing their distances in an iterative fashion. We use the contour coherence under a multi-view rigid registration framework, and this enables the reconstruction of accurate and complete 3D models from as few as 4 frames. We further extend it to handle articulations, and this allows us to model articulated objects such as human body. Experimental results on both synthetic and real data demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of our contour coherence based registration approach to wide baseline range scans, and to 3D modeling.