METHOD AND APPARATUS FOR GENERATING A 3D REGION FROM A SURROUNDING IMAGERY

Techniques for generating a 3D region from a surrounding imagery are disclosed. The surrounding imagery comprising a sequence of side view images taken respectively at a known position around an object. The images are preprocessed to generate corresponding sequence of mask images. To accelerate the subsequent space carving process, each of the mask images is encoded uniquely using what is called herein a Maximal Area Encoding scheme. In the space carving process, volumetric cells or cubes representing the object are recursively subdivided to gradually fit the object by “carving” away those cubes that are not occupied by any of the object. All cubes are encoded and indexed using an octree structure.