Multi-view stereo (MVS) algorithms now produce reconstructions
that rival laser range scanner accuracy. However,
stereo algorithms require textured surfaces, and therefore
work poorly for many architectural scenes (e.g., building
interiors with textureless, painted walls). This paper
presents a novel MVS approach to overcome these limitations
for Manhattan World scenes, i.e., scenes that consists
of piece-wise planar surfaces with dominant directions.
Given a set of calibrated photographs, we first reconstruct
textured regions using an existing MVS algorithm,
then extract dominant plane directions, generate plane hypotheses,
and recover per-view depth maps using Markov
random fields. We have tested our algorithm on several
datasets ranging from office interiors to outdoor buildings,
and demonstrate results that outperform the current state of
the art for such texture-poor scenes.
Brian Curless, Richard Szeliski, Steven M. Seitz,