3d reconstruction from axis-aligned photos

Question

Having poked through the other threads on this topic, I believe there may be a reasonably simple answer to my question. I'm given a collection of six axis-aligned photographs of an object, such as this:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/nnenn/4479290754/in/photostream

Are there any algorithms that would reconstruct a 3d approximation of this object? One thing that I tried with marginal success was to create six 3-dimensional "prisms" (one for each picture) that are infinite in the x-, y-, or z-direction, and take the intersection of these. This works OK, but it's a bit sensitive to the inputs and I'd like to know if there's something more robust that's well-known. I should add that I expect that some manual intervention is clearly going to be required, but I'd like to know how to minimize the amount of such intervention necessary.

One subroutine that might be useful is something like the following: suppose I were to take each pixel in the six photos and identify it to a component, so e.g. all pixels belonging to the cockpit were labelled "1", all pixels belonging to the leftmost missile were labelled "2", and so forth. Would this help in the reconstruction?

Thanks!

Answer 1

This is almost a textbook example for a "space carving" or volume intersection solution. Here is a reasonable introduction to the paper.