Acquisition of Grayscale Occluding Hulls by Silhouette Backprojection

Abstract

A silhouette backprojection method is proposed. The acquired occluding hull is especially useful for describing natural scenes and modeling. Theoretically the hull is obtained as the intersecting regions of sweeped silhouettes backprojected from many viewpoints. Because making such intersecting regions is a binary operation, a lot of fuzzy information along the occluding contours is lost during the process. To improve precision, we devised a continuous-tone silhouette backprojection method which allows us to use more sophisticated grayscale image processing such as smoothing and edge enhancement. Experiments show that this method retains weak object details which are sometimes lost by using the traditional binary operation.