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Selforganizology, 2028, 15(3-4): 54-112
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Article

SpaceCarvingJS: Silhouette-based 3D reconstruction using space carving in the browser

WenJun Zhang
School of Life Sciences, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou 510275, China; International Academy of Ecology and Environmental Sciences, Hong Kong

Received 13 July 2026;Accepted 26 July 2026;Published online 10 August 2026;Published 1 December 2028
IAEES

Abstract
from turntable rotation videos or ordered image sequences using silhouette segmentation and space carving. Entirely self-contained, it requires no external libraries, servers, WebGL, or cloud services; all computation runs locally in the user's browser. The pipeline consists of frame sampling with adaptive letterboxing, binary silhouette extraction via background-colour distance or luminance thresholding (with Otsu auto-threshold, morphological opening/closing, largest-component filtering, and hole filling), estimation of turntable geometry (rotation axis, radius, and vertical extent), voxel-based space carving under orthographic or perspective projection with a user-adjustable consistency threshold, isosurface extraction using a table-free Surface Nets algorithm, and Taubin mesh smoothing. The tool supports video (MP4, WebM, MOV, etc.) and image (PNG, JPEG, etc.) inputs, as well as a built-in synthetic demo for testing. Users can interactively tune segmentation parameters, voxel resolution (typically 112-224 per axis), consistency thresholds, smoothing iterations, and projection mode. A software rasterizer provides real-time 3D preview without WebGL, and the final mesh can be exported as OBJ or PLY with optional vertex normals and normalized height. The method reconstructs the visual hull, the intersection of all silhouette cones, which faithfully represents exterior surfaces visible from the input views but cannot recover concavities that remain hidden in every silhouette. It does not estimate texture, material properties, or precise camera calibration. With a 112^3 grid, memory usage is approximately 45 MB for the signed volume, and computational cost scales with voxel count and number of views. SpaceCarvingJS is particularly suited for teaching, rapid prototyping, and rough modeling of objects on a turntable with uniform background and stable lighting. It offers a transparent, dependency-free, and fully interactive implementation of the classical space-carving pipeline, making it a valuable educational and research tool for visual-hull reconstruction.

Keywords 3D reconstruction;visual hull;space carving;silhouette segmentation;voxel;Surface Nets;turntable;browser-based;dependency-free;OBJ/PLY export.


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