Terrain Geometry from Monocular Image Sequences

Terrain reconstruction from images is an ill-posed, yet commonly desired Structure from Motion task when compositing visual effects into live-action photography. These surfaces are required for choreography of a scene, casting physically accurate shadows of CG elements, and occlusions. We present a novel framework for generating the geometry of landscapes from extremely noisy point cloud datasets obtained via limited resolution techniques, particularly optical flow based vision algorithms applied to live-action video plates. Our contribution is a new statistical approach to remove erroneous tracks ('outliers') by employing a unique combination of well established techniques-including Gaussian Mixture Models (GMMs) for robust parameter estimation and Radial Basis Functions (RBFs) for scattered data interpolation-to exploit the natural constraints of this problem. Our algorithm offsets the tremendously laborious task of modeling these landscapes by hand, automatically generating a visually consistent, camera position dependent, thin-shell surface mesh within seconds for a typical tracking shot.