LAUSR

Among the modern means of 3D geometry creation that exist in the literature, there are the Multi-View Stereo (MVS) reconstruction methods that received much attention from the research community and the multimedia industry. In fact, several methods showed that it is possible to recover geometry only from images with reconstruction accuracies paralleling that of excessively expensive laser scanners. The majority of these methods perform on images such as online community photo collection and estimate the surface position with its orientation by minimizing a matching cost function defined over a small local region. However, these datasets not only they are large but also contain more challenging scenes setups with different photometric effects; therefore fine-grained details of an object’s surface cannot be captured. This paper presents a robust multi-view stereo method based on metaheuristic optimization namely the Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) in order to find the optimal depth, orientation, and surface roughness. To deal with the various shading and stereo mismatch problems caused by rough surfaces, shadows, and interreflections, we propose to use a robust matching/energy function which is a combination of two similarity measurements. Finally, our method computes individual depth maps that can be merged into compelling scene reconstructions. The proposed method is evaluated quantitatively using well-known Middlebury datasets and the obtained results show a high completeness score and comparable accuracy to those of the current top performing algorithms.