A pipeline for building 3D models using depth cameras

Title: A pipeline for building 3D models using depth cameras

Teams: Microsoft

Writers: Avishek Chatterjee Suraj Jain Venu Madhav Govindu

Publication date: June 1998

Abstract

In this paper we describe a system for building geometrically consistent 3D models using structured-light depth cameras. While the commercial availability of such devices, i.e. Kinect, has made obtaining depth images easy, the data tends to be corrupted with high levels of noise. In order to work with such noise levels, our approach decouples the problem of scan alignment from that of merging the aligned scans. The alignment problem is solved by using two methods tailored to handle the effects of depth image noise and erroneous alignment estimation. The noisy depth images are smoothed by means of an adaptive bilateral filter that explicitly accounts for the sensitivity of the depth estimation by the scanner. Our robust method overcomes failures due to individual pairwise ICP errors and gives alignments that are accurate and consistent. Finally, the aligned scans are merged using a standard procedure based on the signed distance function representation to build a full 3D model of the object of interest. We demonstrate the performance of our system by building complete 3D models of objects of different physical sizes, ranging from cast-metal busts to a complete model of a small room as well as that of a complex scale model of an aircraft.