A GENERAL SURFACE APPROACH TO THE INTEGRATION OF A SET OF RANGE VIEWS

This paper presents a new and general solution to the problem of range view integration. The integration problem consists in computing a con nected surface model from a set of registered range images acquired fr om different viewpoints. The proposed method does not impose constrain ts on the topology of the observed surfaces, the position of the viewp oints, or the number of views that can lie merged. The integrated surf ace model is piecewise estimated by a set of triangulations modeling e ach canonical subset of the Venn diagram of the set of range views. Th e connection of these local models by constrained Delaunay triangulati ons yields a non-redundant surface triangulation describing all surfac e elements sampled by the set of range views. Experimental results sho w that the integration technique can be used to build connected surfac e models of free-form objects. No integrated models built from objects of such complexity have yet been reported in the literature. It is as sumed that accurate range views are available and that frame transform ations between all pairs of views can be reliably computed.