Abstract
Modeling complex realistic objects is a difficult and time consuming process. Nevertheless, with improvements in rendering speed and quality, more and more applications require such realistic complex 3D objects. We present an interactive modeling system that extracts 3D objects from photographs. Our key contribution lies in the tight integration of a point-based representation and user interactivity, by introducing a set of interactive tools to guide reconstruction. 3D color points are a flexible and effective representation for very complex objects; adding, moving, or removing points is fast and simple, facilitating easy improvement of object quality. Because images and depths maps can be very rapidly generated from points, testing validity of point projections in several images is efficient and simple. These properties allow our system to rapidly generate a first approximate model, and allow the user to continuously and interactively guide the generation of points, both locally and globally. A set of interactive tools and optimizations are introduced to help the user improve the extracted objects.
