Image-based modeling of plants and trees

Sing Bing Kang

Plants and trees are among the most complex natural objects. Much work has been done attempting to model them, with varying degrees of success. In this book, we review the various approaches in computer graphics, which we categorize as rule-based, image-based, and sketch-based methods. We describe our approaches for modeling plants and trees using images. Image-based approaches have the distinct advantage that the resulting model inherits the realistic shape and complexity of a real plant or tree. We use different techniques for modeling plants (with relatively large leaves) and trees (with relatively small leaves). With plants, we model each leaf from images, while for trees, the leaves are only approximated due to their small size and large number. Both techniques start with the same initial step of structure from motion on multiple images of the plant or tree that is to be modeled.