Hardware-accelerated visual hull reconstruction and rendering

We present a novel algorithm for simultaneous visual hull reconstruction and rendering by exploiting off-the-shelf graphics hardware. The reconstruction is accomplished by projective texture mapping in conjunction with the alpha test. Parallel to the reconstruction, rendering is also carried out in the graphics pipeline. We texture the visual hull view-dependently with the aid of fragment shaders, such as nVIDIAs register combiners. Both reconstruction and rendering are done in a single rendering pass. We achieve frame rates of more than 80 fps on a standard PC equipped with a commodity graphics card. The performance is significantly faster than that of previously reported similar systems.