Elastic Fragments for Dense Scene Reconstruction

Qian-Yi Zhou, Stephen Miller, Vladlen Koltun; Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2013, pp. 473-480

We present an approach to reconstruction of detailed scene geometry from range video. Range data produced by commodity handheld cameras suffers from high-frequency errors and low-frequency distortion. Our approach deals with both sources of error by reconstructing locally smooth scene fragments and letting these fragments deform in order to align to each other. We develop a volumetric registration formulation that leverages the smoothness of the deformation to make optimization practical for large scenes. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach substantially increases the fidelity of complex scene geometry reconstructed with commodity handheld cameras.