Variational Surface Interpolation from Sparse Point and Normal Data

Many visual cues for surface reconstruction from known views are sparse in nature, e.g. specularities, surface silhouettes and salient features in an otherwise textureless region. Often these cues are the only information available to an observer. To allow these constraints to be used either in conjunction with dense constraints such as pixel-wise similarity, or alone, we formulate such constraints in a variational framework. We propose a sparse variational constraint in the level set framework, enforcing a surface to pass through a specific point and a sparse variational constraint on the surface normal along the observed viewing direction, as is the nature of e.g. specularities. These constraints are capable of reconstructing surfaces from extremely sparse data. The approach has been applied and validated on the shape from specularities problem.

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2007
• Where: PAMI
• Authors: Jan Erik Solem, Henrik Aanæs, Anders Heyden
• Keywords: Many Visual Cues, PAMI 2007, Sparse Variational Constraint, Surface Reconstruction