Structure of the text

Chapter 2 and 3 give the geometric foundation to understand the principles behind the presented approaches. The former introduces projective geometry and the stratification of geometric structure. The latter describes the perspective camera model and derives the relation between multiple views. These are at the basis of the possibility to achieve structure and motion recovery. This allows the interested reader to understand what is behind the techniques presented in the other chapters, but can also be skipped.

Chapter 4 deals with the extraction and matching of features and the recovery of multiple view relations. A robust technique is presented to automatically relate two views to each other.

Chapter 5 describes how starting from the relation between consecutive images the structure and motion of the whole sequence can be built up. Chapter 6 briefly describes some self-calibration approaches and proposes a practical method to reduce the ambiguity on the structure and motion to metric.

Chapter 7 is concerned with computing correspondences for all the image points. First an algorithm for stereo matching is presented. Then rectification is explained. A general method is proposed which can transform every image pair to standard stereo configuration. Finally, a multi-view approach is presented which allows to obtain denser depth maps and better accuracy.

In Chapter 8 it is explained how the results obtained in the previous chapters can be combined to obtain realistic models of the acquired scenes. At this point a lot of information is available and different types of models can be computed. The chapter describes how to obtain surface models or volumetric models. Even plenoptic models and models usable for augmented reality are briefly discussed.