Stereovision by Active Surface Model

Stereovision is known to be one of the most important tools for robot vision systems. Previously, 2D active contour model has been applied to stereovision by defining the contour on the 3D space instead of image plane. However, the proposed model is still that of curve so that some complex shapes such as surfaces with high curvature can not be properly estimated because of occlusion phenomena. In this paper, the authors extend the curve model to the surface model. The surface is approximated by polygons and new energy function and its optimization method for surface estimation is proposed. Its effectiveness is examined by experiments with real stereo images.