From Multiview Image Curves to 3D Drawings

Reconstructing 3D scenes from multiple views has made impressive strides in recent years, chiefly by correlating isolated feature points, intensity patterns, or curvilinear structures. In the general setting - without controlled acquisition, abundant texture, curves and surfaces following specific models or limiting scene complexity - most methods produce unorganized point clouds, meshes, or voxel representations, with some exceptions producing unorganized clouds of 3D curve fragments. Ideally, many applications require structured representations of curves, surfaces and their spatial relationships. This paper presents a step in this direction by formulating an approach that combines 2D image curves into a collection of 3D curves, with topological connectivity between them represented as a 3D graph. This results in a 3D drawing, which is complementary to surface representations in the same sense as a 3D scaffold complements a tent taut over it. We evaluate our results against truth on synthetic and real datasets.