Visibility estimation is arguably the most difficult problem in dense 3D reconstruction from multiple arbitrary views. In this paper, we propose a simple new approach to estimating visibility based on position and orientation of local surface patches. Using our concept of oriented visibility, we present a new algorithm for multiview reconstruction based on exact global optimization of surface photoconsistency using graph cuts on a CW-complex. In contrast to many previous methods for 3D reconstruction from arbitrary views, our method does not depend on initialization and is robust to photometrically difficult situations.
Victor S. Lempitsky, Yuri Boykov, Denis V. Ivanov