Unsupervised Three-dimensional Reconstruction of Small Rocks from a Single Two-dimensional Image

Abstract

Surfaces covered with pebbles and small rocks can often be found in nature or in human-shaped environments. Generating an accurate three-dimensional model of these kind of surfaces from a reference image can be challenging, especially if one wants to be able to animate each pebble individually. To undertake this kind of task manually is time consuming and impossible to achieve in dynamic terrains animations. The method described in this paper allows unsupervised automatic generation of three-dimensional textured rocks from a two-dimensional image aiming to closely match the original image as much as possible.