Parametric Surface Representation with Bump Image for Dense 3D Modeling Using an RBG-D Camera

When constructing a dense 3D model of an indoor static scene from a sequence of RGB-D images, the choice of the 3D representation (e.g. 3D mesh, cloud of points or implicit function) is of crucial importance. In the last few years, the volumetric truncated signed distance function (TSDF) and its extensions have become popular in the community and largely used for the task of dense 3D modelling using RGB-D sensors. However, as this representation is voxel based, it offers few possibilities for manipulating and/or editing the constructed 3D model, which limits its applicability. In particular, the amount of data required to maintain the volumetric TSDF rapidly becomes huge which limits possibilities for portability. Moreover, simplifications (such as mesh extraction and surface simplification) significantly reduce the accuracy of the 3D model (especially in the color space), and editing the 3D model is difficult. We propose a novel compact, flexible and accurate 3D surface representation based on parametric surface patches augmented by geometric and color texture images. Simple parametric shapes such as planes are roughly fitted to the input depth images, and the deviations of the 3D measurements to the fitted parametric surfaces are fused into a geometric texture image (called the Bump image). A confidence and color texture image are also built. Our 3D scene representation is accurate yet memory efficient. Moreover, updating or editing the 3D model becomes trivial since it is reduced to manipulating 2D images. Our experimental results demonstrate the advantages of our proposed 3D representation through a concrete indoor scene reconstruction application.