Multiresolution volumetric 3D object reconstruction for collaborative interactions

Within the framework of collaborative interactions with 3D numerical copies of real objects inserted in virtual environments, this paper tackles the issue of 3D object reconstruction from multiple calibrated cameras. After examining the various constraints related to collaborative systems, we propose comprehensive, state of the art 3D reconstruction techniques. The main families of approaches are here identified, described, and discussed in detail. An analysis of the literature shows that there is a lack of methods that are able to respond to the needs of the collaborative interaction applications, and that perform adequately in terms of computation time and reconstruction accuracy. Accordingly, we propose a new multiresolution volumetric approach that is able to obtain numerical copies of real objects at multiple resolutions. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach provides accurate reconstructions at reasonable, interactive computation times. The use of the proposed approach for progressive insertion of reconstructed objects in the prototype interfaces MOWGLI and Spin-3D developed by FranceTelecom R&D is also illustrated. The text was submitted by the authors in English. Rachid Guerchouche. Was born in Algeria in 1979. He received an Engineer Degree in electronics from the National Polytechnic School of Algiers, Algeria in June 2004, and a research Masters Degree in Virtual Reality and Complex Systems Engineering from Université Evry-Val d’Essonne (France) in June 2005. He is currently a PhD student jointly in the ARTEMIS Department at TELECOM & Management SudParis and in the VIA Project Unit of the IRIS Laboratory at France Télécom R&D. Olivier Bernier. Was born in 1964. He received the diploma of the Ecole Polytech-nique (Palaiseau, France) in 1986 and the diploma of the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Télécommunications (Paris, France) in 1988. Since this date, he has worked as a Research Engineer at Orange Labs-FT R&D, the research center of France Telecom. His areas of interest are computer vision, statistical learning and pattern recognition, in particular applied to advanced human machine interfaces. Titus Zaharia. Received an Engineer Degree in Electronics and the Masters Degree in Electronics from University POLITEHNICA (Bucharest, Romania) in 1995 and 1996, respectively. In 2001, he obtained a PhD degree in Mathematics and Computer Science from University Paris V—René Descartes (Paris, France). He then joined the ARTEMIS Department at TELECOM & Management SudParis as a research engineer, and became an Associate Professor in 2002. His research interests concern visual content indexing and coding, and include feature extraction, image and video segmentation, motion detection and estimation, 2D/3D reconstruction, virtual character modelling and animation, virtual/augmented reality, digital interactive TV, calibration techniques, and color image processing. Titus Zaharia is a member of SPIE.