Visual 3D modeling of real-world objects and scenes

world. The extraction of 3D information from images is an important
research problem in computer vision and graphics. The ubiquitous
presence of cameras and the tremendous advances of processing and
communication technologies yields important opportunities and challenges
in those areas.
My work has focussed on developing flexible techniques for recovering 3D
shape, motion and appearance from images. A first example of this is an
approach to recover photo-realistic 3D models of static objects or
scenes from videos recorded with a hand-held camera. A key aspect of
our approach is the ability to also recover the geometric and
photometric calibration of the camera from the image data so that our
techniques can also work with uncalibrated consumer cameras or archive
photographs. Recent work explores the possibility to also reconstruct
dynamic articulated objects from a single video stream. The simplest way
to work with dynamic objects, however, consists of using multiple
cameras. Here also the complete calibration and synchronization can be
obtained from video recorded during normal operation. I will present
shape reconstruction approaches that use photo-consistency (including a
real-time stereo approach that runs on graphics hardware),
silhouette-consistency and both. Towards the future, one of my main
research goals is to develop approaches for capturing immersive 4D
spatio-temporal representation of dynamic events taking place in large
scale environments. Applications ranging from archaeology and 3D urban
modeling, to special effects and 3D tele-medecine will be used to
illustrate our work.