Head model acquisition from silhouettes

Abstract

This paper describes a practical system developed for generating 3D models of human heads from silhouettes alone. The input to the system is an image sequence acquired from circular motion. Both the camera motion and the 3D structure of the head are estimated using silhouettes which are tracked throughout the sequence. Special properties of the camera motion and their relationships with the intrinsic parameters of the camera are exploited to provide a simple parameterization of the fundamental matrix relating any pair of views in the sequence. Such a parameterization greatly reduces the dimension of the search space for the optimization problem. In contrast to previous methods, this work can cope with incomplete circular motion and more widely spaced images. Experiments on real image sequences are carried out, showing accurate recovery of 3D shapes.