Very interesting. I knew I was not the first to think along these lines, I just was not sure what terms to google for prior research.
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.)