Image-based 3D acquisition of archaeological heritage and applications

In this paper an approach is presented that obtains virtual models from sequences of images. The system can deal with uncalibrated image sequences acquired with a hand-held camera. Based on tracked or matched features the relations between multiple views are computed. From this both the structure of the scene and the motion of the camera are retrieved. The ambiguity on the reconstruction is restricted from projective to metric through auto-calibration. A flexible multi-view stereo matching scheme is used to obtain a dense estimation of the surface geometry. From the computed data virtual models can be constructed or, inversely, virtual models can be included in the original images.