The present approach relates to the use of a point cloud of an object to initialize or seed a space carving technique used to generate a 3D model of the object. In one implementation, feature matching is performed on 2D images, with matched features constituting the points of a point cloud model. The point cloud generated in this manner, is one input of a foreground/background segmentation algorithm, which generates a set of segmented 2D images used by a space carving routine to generate a 3D model of the object.