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Carnegie Mellon Robotics Institute

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Abstract

The complete set of measurements that could ever be used by a passive 3D vision algorithm is the plenoptic function or light-field. We give a concise characterization of when the light-field of a Lambertian scene uniquely determines its shape and, conversely, when the shape is inherently ambiguous. In particular, we show that stereo computed from the light-field is ambiguous if and only if the scene is radiating light of a constant intensity (and color, etc) over an extended region.

Keywords

3D shape reconstruction, stereo, shape-from-silhouette, the plenoptic function, light-fields, uniqueness

Notes

Sponsor: U.S. Office of Naval Research

Grant ID: N00014-00-1-0915

Associated Center(s) / Consortia: Vision and Autonomous Systems Center

Associated Project(s): Photometric Limits on Computer Vision and Light-fields

Number of pages: 10

Text Reference

Simon Baker, Terence Sim, and Takeo Kanade, "When is the Shape of a Scene Unique Given its Light-Field: A Fundamental Theorem of 3D Vision?," IEEE Transaction on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, Vol. 25, No. 1, January, 2003, pp. 100 - 109.

BibTeX Reference

@article{Baker_2003_4030,
   author = "Simon Baker and Terence Sim and Takeo Kanade",
   title = "When is the Shape of a Scene Unique Given its Light-Field: A Fundamental Theorem of 3D Vision?",
   journal = "IEEE Transaction on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence",
   pages = "100 - 109",
   month = "January",
   year = "2003",
   volume = "25",
   number = "1",
}

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