Reconstructing 3D Tree Models from Instrumented Photographs Ilya Shlyakhter,Max Rozenoer,Julie Dorsey, and Seth Teller Massachusetts Institute of Technology IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications 2001

Realism The realistic modeling of vegetation is an important problem in computer graphics. Vegetation adds a significant dimension of realism to a scene. Improve realism in architectural landscapes by trees.

Many techiques and modeling package have been developed for contructing a tree of a particular type (Tree Professional Software, MaxTrees etc.). Variation between two tree of single type can be very significant, depending on factors (growth conditions - sunlight, human intervention - pruning branch)

The techniques and packages currently available don’t provide sufficient control over the final shape. The author proposed a solution for reconstructing a faithful 3D model of foliaged tree from a set of instrumented photographs.

System Details The system consists of four stages. The input is a set of images of a tree, images covering at least 135 degree around the tree Assume the position and orientation for each image is known.

Stage 1: Image segmentation 2: Visual hull construction 3: Skeleton construction 4: L-system

Future work Involves tree-specific knowledge into the algorithm. Recover foliage density in the tree. The resulting skeleton often differs greatly from the actual one. Adding constraints based on knowledge of growth patterns for particular tree types should mitigate this problem.

Future work (cont.) The L-system used for reconstruction should be tree-type specific. No work has been done on reconstructing the nonfoliaged winter trees.