What to submit

Most multi-view reconstruction algorithms generate a triangle mesh, a set of points, or a set of voxels (cubes). At this point, we only support triangle meshes in a standard format (Stanford's PLY format) to facilitate the evaluation process. In its ASCII form, PLY is a simple text format for meshes that is supported by the public domain Scanalyze program. Scanalyze is a geometry viewer and manipulator that runs on windows, linux, and irix. Another program that allows viewing and manipulating of PLY files is MeshLab, which might be slightly easier to install than Scanalyze. MeshLab also supports a variety of other mesh file formats.

Although there are public domain libraries to assist in the creation of PLY files, it is probably simplest to directly generate text files as described below. To avoid issues with CR/LF conversions, we advise you to use the ASCII format rather than the binary format. The file sizes will be similar once compressed with zip or gzip.

Important: Be sure to specify all points in the scene coordinate system defined by each data set. A sanity check is that your point coordinates should lie roughly within the bounding box specified in the README file.

PLEASE view your meshes with Scanalyze or MeshLab before submitting them - this will catch many common bugs such as inverted surface normals.

How to submit

Please contact Daniel Scharstein at scharmiddlebury.edu if you would like to submit your results. At this point, the easiest way to submit your results is to create a .zip or .tgz file that contains your mesh(es) in PLY format as described below. Please use the following naming scheme, where "author" should be the last name of the first author of your results:

author_temple.ply	author_templeRing.ply	author_templeSparseRing.ply
author_dino.ply	author_dinoRing.ply	author_dinoSparseRing.ply

If possible, please post your zip file on the web in a publicly readable directory, and provide the URL of this directory in your email. For preliminary results, we can create a "private" results page, but we ask that you eventually submit your results to the "official" results page. Once you do, please let us know, for each data set, the run-time, processor type, and CPU speed. Also please provide the bibliographical reference information of the accompanying paper so we can properly cite your method. If you want to post the results of an anonymous conference submission, we will cite the method as "anonymous" and refer to it by the title of the paper. However, please still follow the above naming scheme for your files - but rest assured that your name will remain hidden. :) Once you know the official status of your paper, please let us know and we will update the results page.

Again, PLEASE view your meshes with Scanalyze or MeshLab before submitting them.

The PLY format (.ply)

The mesh file format specifies a list of floating point vertices (<x>, <y>, <z>) followed by a list of faces each specified by a list of vertex indices. Vertex indices start at 0 and are assumed to be listed in counter-clockwise order for each triangle so that the right-hand rule orients the implicit triangle normals in the front-facing direction. RGB color is optional; if you do not wish to supply it, you can set the colors arbitrarily, or you can omit the "property uchar diffuse_*" lines as well as the (<r>, <g>, <b>) colors themselves.

--filestart--
ply
format ascii 1.0
element vertex <number of vertices>
property float x
property float y
property float z
property uchar diffuse_red
property uchar diffuse_green
property uchar diffuse_blue
element face <number of faces>
property list uchar int vertex_indices
end_header
<x> <y> <z> <r> <g> <b>
.
.
.
3 <index1> <index2> <index3>
.
.
.
--fileend--

Click here for more on PLY and a number of tools to convert to and from PLY and a number of other common mesh formats. Here's a sample mesh ply file. The mesh will be immediately viewable in Scanalyze. To see the stored color, turn on "Render/True color"; you can also turn on "Render/Emissive" to see the color as an emissive, rather than shaded, rendering.