Automated texture registration and stitching for real world models

A system is presented which automatically registers and stitches textures acquired from multiple photographic images onto the surface of a given corresponding 3D model. Within this process the camera position, direction and field of view must be determined for each of the images. For this registration, which aligns a 2D image to a 3D model we present an efficient hardware-accelerated silhouette-based algorithm working on different image resolutions that accurately registers each image without any user interaction. Besides the silhouettes, the given texture information can be used to improve accuracy by comparing one stitched texture to already registered images resulting in a global multi-view optimization. After the 3D-2D registration for each part of the 3D model's surface the view is determined which provides the best available texture. Textures are blended at the borders of regions assigned to different views.