Volume Estimation of Airbags: A Visual Hull Approach

Abstract: This thesis presents a complete and fully automatic method for estimating the volume of an airbag, through all stages of its inflation, with multiple synchronized high-speed cameras. Using recorded contours of the inflating airbag, its visual hull is reconstructed with a novel method: The intersections of all back-projected contours are first identified with an accelerated epipolar algorithm. These intersections, together with additional points sampled from concave surface regions of the visual hull, are then Delaunay triangulated to a connected set of tetrahedra. Finally, the visual hull is extracted by carving away the tetrahedra that are classified as inconsistent with the contours, according to a voting procedure. The volume of an airbag's visual hull is always larger than the airbag's real volume. By projecting a known synthetic model of the airbag into the cameras, this volume offset is computed, and an accurate estimate of the real airbag volume is extracted. Even though volume estimates can be computed for all camera setups, the cameras should be specially posed to achieve optimal results. Such poses are uniquely found for different airbag models with a separate, fully automatic, simulated annealing algorithm. Satisfying results are presented for both synthetic and real-world data.