3d surface reconstruction using graph cuts with surface constraints

We describe a graph cut algorithm to recover the 3D object surface using both silhouette and foreground color information. The graph cut algorithm is used for optimization on a color consistency field. Constraints are added to improve its performance. These constraints are a set of predetermined locations that the true surface of the object is likely to pass through. They are used to preserve protrusions and to pursue concavities respectively in the first and the second phase of the algorithm. We also introduce a method for dealing with silhouette uncertainties arising from background subtraction on real data. We test the approach on synthetic data with different numbers of views (8, 16, 32, 64) and on a real image set containing 30 views of a toy squirrel.