Robust and Efficient Photo-Consistency Estimation for Volumetric 3D Reconstruction

Estimating photo-consistency is one of the most important ingredients for any 3D stereo reconstruction technique that is based on a volumetric scene representation. This paper presents a new, illumination invariant photo-consistency measure for high quality, volumetric 3D reconstruction from calibrated images. In contrast to current standard methods such as normalized cross-correlation it supports unconstrained camera setups and non-planar surface approximations. We show how this measure can be embedded into a highly efficient, completely hardware accelerated volumetric reconstruction pipeline by exploiting current graphics processors. We provide examples of high quality reconstructions with computation times of only a few seconds to minutes, even for large numbers of cameras and high volumetric resolutions.