Making 3D representation of an object with a webcam

Question

Is it possible to make a 3D representation of an object by capturing many different angles using a webcam? If it is, how is it possible and how is the image-processing done?

My plan is to make a 3D representation of a person using a webcam, then from the 3D representation, i will be able to tell the person's vital statistics.

Answer 1

As Bart said (but did not post as an actual answer) this is entirely possible.

The research topic you are interested in is often called multi view stereo or something similar.

The basic idea resolves around using point correspondences between two (or more) images and then try to find the best matching camera positions. When the positions are found you can use stereo algorithms to back project the image points into a 3D coordinate system and form a point cloud.

From that point cloud you can then further process it to get the measurements you are looking for.

If you are completely new to the subject you have some fascinating reading to look forward to!

Bart proposed Multiple view geometry by Hartley and Zisserman, which is a very nice book indeed.