  In this paper we propose a new approach to incrementally initialize a
manifold surface for automatic 3D reconstruction from images. More precisely we
focus on the automatic initialization of a 3D mesh as close as possible to the
final solution; indeed many approaches require a good initial solution for
further refinement via multi-view stereo techniques. Our novel algorithm
automatically estimates an initial manifold mesh for surface evolving
multi-view stereo algorithms, where the manifold property needs to be enforced.
It bootstraps from 3D points extracted via Structure from Motion, then iterates
between a state-of-the-art manifold reconstruction step and a novel mesh
sweeping algorithm that looks for new 3D points in the neighborhood of the
reconstructed manifold to be added in the manifold reconstruction. The
experimental results show quantitatively that the mesh sweeping improves the
resolution and the accuracy of the manifold reconstruction, allowing a better
convergence of state-of-the-art surface evolution multi-view stereo algorithms.
