Ray Traversal for Incremental Voxel Colouring

Abstract

Image based scene reconstruction from multiple views is an interesting challenge, with many ambiguities and sources of noise. One approach to scene reconstruction is Voxel Colouring, Seitz and Dyer [26], which uses colour information in images and handles the problem of occlusion. Culbertson and Malzbender [11], introduced Generalised Voxel Colouring (GVC) which uses projection and rasterization to establish global scene visibility. Our work has involved investigating the use of ray traversal as an efficient alternative. We have developed two main approaches along this line, Ray Images and Ray Buckets. Comparisons between implementations of our algorithms and variations of GVC are presented, as well as applications to areas of optimisation colour consistency and level of detail. Ray traversal seems a promising approach to scene visibility, but requires more work to be of practical use. Our methods show some advantages over existing approaches in time use. However we have not been as succesful as an- ticipated in reconstruction quality shown by implementation of optimisation colour consistency.