Finding the Grid

Finding the grid turned out to be a much heftier problem than anticipated. It is split up into two fairly orthogonal tasks: image processing to recover corners and edges, and then setting up the grid correspondences given the corners and edges.

Go here for some ramblings on how edges were how to detect. Basically, because the edges are thick, gradient-based edge detectors pick up two edges instead of one.

Instead, I developed a corner-detection algorithm specifically tweaked to this problem. It just about never misses a corner, but occasionally an edge might have a change in brightness on it (perhaps from a surface feature), and that point on the edge will be labeled a corner.

The corner detector is based on the Laplacian operator. It tries different stencils of orientations for the Laplacian's support, trying to find the one with the best "match," which is when the Laplacian is large at one orientation and near-zero at the "opposite orientation.


Here we can see that on the left, the Laplacian has a very large value (oops, the figure should be 4 and -1), while on the right, the Laplacian evaluates close to 0.




Results of corner detection in Einstein and Brett.



There is a one-to-one mapping between points in the original grid and points projected onto the surface, as seen by the camera.
Recovering the correspondences turned out to be much harder because the corner extraction was not perfect. Any errors propogated to the correspondence will not only show up as horrible artifacts in the 3-d reconstruction, but will also wreck the correspondence algorithm, causing more bad correspondences to domino.

The first step of the algorithm is to recover some correspondences that are guaranteed (probabalistically) to be correct. Because we have color information for edges that is mostly reliable, we can match multiple edges to make the data even more reliable. A few edges may not even map to a unique location in the original grid. We chose to search for horizontal edges along a line because in an orthographic setup, horizontal lines in the grid map to horizontal lines in the image. Experimentation showed that around 12 edge-links in a row were necessary to guarantee both uniqueness and that an error an edge labelling (or an extra or missing edge from an extra or missing corner) didn't map to elsewhere in the original grid.


A strip of edges got mapped incorrectly to the original grid.

Once unique horizontal strips are indentified, the correspondences propogate outward through a breadth-first search. Edges are added if they match in color. (The color of an edge is determined by sampling the colors near the midpoint between the edge's two vertices.) However, because of the nearby edges could share the same color and because there are errors in the image processing, a more robust method is needed to guarantee that no errors are inserted into the correspondence mapping. Instead of just looking at one edge, we can look at multiple edges. If all agree, then with almost always the correspondence is correct. The breadth-first search looks for places were it can estimate the location of the next vertex (by assuming the surface is locally planar). It then finds the nearest vertex to the predicted location such that the edges from that vertex satisfy the correct coloring. If the vertex is close enough to the estimated location, the correspondence is established.

Below are several of the cases considered. On the left is the connectivity on the initial grid. On the right is the corner data. Solid arrows indicate known correspondences. The question mark is the predicted location. Note that for case 3, two corners are guessed, with three edge colors used to verify. The cases are ordered in terms of robustness. The fourth case is the least restrictive, but also the least robust. There are a few other cases that are not shown here that are less restrictive and less robust. They only get run if the other cases fall through and fail to extend the correspondences.













There were a few shortcomings withthe correspondences. We were caught between keeping the algorithm conservative (so the grid never gets built incorrectly and has to go through a costly fixing phase) and making thresholds, etc.as liberal as possible to maximize the amount of surface recovered. Many of the gaps in the models were from areas that were in shadow or were separated from the rest of the model by a shadow (and there was not a big enough line to uniquely identify that component). The teapot was highly specular and caused the thresholds for magenta to fail. Being more liberal with thresholds would certainly identify colors on more edges, but then noise in the brighter areas would get picked up as edges.

The most important issue to address next is identifying more components from the beginning. One possibility is to introduce more colors, such as adding red, green, and blue. Then six color codes would be able to identify regions uniquely with less edges. Also, instead of just looking at a straight line and the colors of the segments along the line, we could look at the colors of the segments branching out from along that line, although the colors of these segments would be less accurate.

Another possiblity would be to use geographic location vertically to resolve ambiguities in matching the horizontal lines. An energy-minimization procedure could reduce the ambiguities to a monotonic mapping.