A moving planar mirror based approach for cultural reconstruction

Modelling from images is a cost-effective means of obtaining virtual cultural heritage models. These models can be effectively constructed from classical Structure from Motion algorithm. However, it's too difficult to reconstruct whole scenes using SFM method since general oriental historic sites contain a very complex shapes and brilliant colours. To overcome this difficulty, the current paper proposes a new reconstruction method based on a moving planar mirror. We devise the mirror posture instead of scene itself as a cue for reconstructing the geometry. That implies that the geometric cues are inserted into the scene by compulsion. With this method, we can obtain the geometrical details regardless of the scene complexity. For this purpose, we first capture image sequences through the moving mirror containing the interested scene, and then calibrate the camera through the mirror's posture. Since the calibration results are still inaccurate due to the detection error, the camera pose is revised using frame-correspondence of the corner points that are easily obtained using the initial camera posture. Finally, 3D information is computed from a set of calibrated image sequences. We validate our approach with a set of experiments on some cultural heritage objects.