Space carving is a similar idea [Kutulakos and Seitz, 2000]: http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~kyros/pubs/00.ijcv.carve.pdf
http://gfx.cs.princeton.edu/proj/3dscanning/
Or you might find some things of interest in my article collection https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/315/articles/index_no_im...
(No doubt Dropbox will disable my public links soon. I wish there were an easy way to mirror my Dropbox folder to S3.)