Reconstruction of planar surfaces behind occlusions in range images

Analysis and reconstruction of range images usually focuses on complex objects completely contained in the field of view; little attention has been devoted so far to the reconstruction of simply shaped wide areas like parts of a wall hidden behind furniture pieces in an indoor range image. The work presented in this paper is aimed at such reconstruction. First of all, the range image is partitioned based on depth discontinuities and fold edges. Next, the planes best fitting each of the regions constituting the partition of the image are determined, A third step locates potentially contiguous surfaces, while a final step reconstructs the hidden regions. This paper presents results for reconstruction of the shape of planar surfaces behind arbitrary occluding surfaces. The system proved to be effective and the reconstructed surfaces appear to be reasonable. Some examples of results are presented from the Bornholm church range images.