Building 3-D Models From Unregistered Range Images

The authors describe an approach to building a three-dimensional model from a set of range images. The authors' goal is to build models of free-form surfaces obtained from arbitrary viewing directions, with no initial estimate of the relative viewing directions. The approach is based on building discrete meshes representing the surfaces observed in each of the range images, to map each of the meshes to a spherical image, and to compute the transformations between the views by matching the spherical images. The meshes are built using an iterative fitting algorithm previously developed; the spherical images are built by matching the nodes of the surface meshes to the nodes of a reference mesh on the unit sphere and by storing a measure of curvature at every node. The authors describe the algorithms used for building such models from range images and for matching them. The authors give results obtained using range images of complex objects.