Section: Scientific Foundations

Shape Acquisition

Recovering shapes from images is a fundamental task in computer vision. Applications are numerous and include, in particular, 3D modeling applications and mixed reality applications where real shapes are mixed with virtual environments. The problem faced here is to recover shape information such as surfaces, point positions, or differential properties from image information. A tremendous research effort has been made in the past to solve this problem and a number of partial solutions had been proposed. However, a fundamental issue still to be addressed is the recovery of full shape information over time sequences. The main difficulties are precision, robustness of computed shapes as well as consistency of these shapes over time. An additional difficulty raised by real-time applications is complexity. Such applications are today feasible but often require powerful computation units such as PC clusters. Thus, significant efforts must also be devoted to switch from traditional single-PC units to modern computation architectures.