Improved Interactive Method for Recovering 2.5D Models from Single Images

In the last years the development of interactive Computer-based methods for building virtual and physical 2.5D models from single shaded images faced with an exponential growth. In particular, a wide range of methods based on image processing-based procedures and on shape from shading (SFS) can be documented. On the basis of the most favorable techniques devised in literature, the present work describes an improved interactive method capable of retrieving 2.5D models using image shading information. The proposed method performs a SFS-based reconstruction where 1) the overall geometry of the expected surface is first recovered and 2) the final 2.5D reconstruction is obtained by minimizing a suitable functional using the rough surface as an initialization function. The method improves previous interactive works by introducing a novel two-step rough surface recovery and a new definition of a functional to be minimized for solving the SFS problem. Tested against a set of case studies the proposed method proves to be effective in providing 2.5D models.