Three-dimensional mesh generation of an object from an image by shape-from-shading and ellipsoidal bubble mesh method

Abstract

Three-dimensional (3D) modeling of object from two-dimensional (2D) image is important for many fields including computer graphics, image understanding and medical imaging. Shape-from-Shading is a popular method for 3D shape estimation from one image. For the 3D mesh generation, Delaunay triangulation is effective. If depths for all pixels in an image are estimated by Shape-from-Shading and 3D Delaunay triangulation is done for the depth data, it is not efficient. We propose an efficient method to generate 3D near-equilateral triangular mesh from 2D image directly. In the proposed method, the projection of 3D mesh on 2D image is generated by ellipsoidal bubble mesh method firstly. Then, the positions of mesh vertices in 3D space are estimated from Lambertian model and the direction of axes of ellipsoidal bubble in ellipsoidal bubble method. We evaluated the proposed method by 3D mesh generation for a simulation image and a picture taken by a digital camera. The results showed good estimation for the shapes of objects.