Accuracy and efficiency are two key problems in large scale incremental Structure from Motion (SfM). In this paper, we propose a unified framework to divide the image set into clusters suitable for reconstruction as well as find multiple reliable and stable starting points. Image partitioning performs in two steps. First, some small image groups are selected at places with high image density, and then all the images are clustered according to their optimal reconstruction paths to these image groups. This promises that the scene is always reconstructed from dense places to sparse areas, which can reduce error accumulation when images have weak overlap. To enable faster speed, images outside the selected group in each cluster are further divided to achieve a greater degree of parallelism. Experiments show that our method achieves significant speedup, higher accuracy and better completeness.
Large scale structure from motion has witnessed great development in recent years. Several complete structure from motion systems have been proposed. Snavely @cite_6 @cite_10 are among the first to propose a complete incremental SfM pipeline. The backbone of their system is a structure from motion approach which computes the photographers' locations and orientations, along with a sparse 3D point cloud.
@cite_10 @cite_6
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Incremental Structure-from-Motion is a prevalent strategy for 3D reconstruction from unordered image collections. While incremental reconstruction systems have tremendously advanced in all regards, robustness, accuracy, completeness, and scalability remain the key problems towards building a truly general-purpose pipeline. We propose a new SfM technique that improves upon the state of the art to make a further step towards this ultimate goal. The full reconstruction pipeline is released to the public as an open-source implementation. Recent work in structure from motion (SfM) has successfully built 3D models from large unstructured collections of images downloaded from the Internet. Most approaches use incremental algorithms that solve progressively larger bundle adjustment problems. These incremental techniques scale poorly as the number of images grows, and can drift or fall into bad local minima. We present an alternative formulation for SfM based on finding a coarse initial solution using a hybrid discrete-continuous optimization, and then improving that solution using bundle adjustment. The initial optimization step uses a discrete Markov random field (MRF) formulation, coupled with a continuous Levenberg-Marquardt refinement. The formulation naturally incorporates various sources of information about both the cameras and the points, including noisy geotags and vanishing point estimates. We test our method on several large-scale photo collections, including one with measured camera positions, and show that it can produce models that are similar to or better than those produced with incremental bundle adjustment, but more robustly and in a fraction of the time. Structure from Motion (SfM) algorithms take as input multi-view stereo images (along with internal calibration information) and yield a 3D point cloud and camera orientations poses in a common 3D coordinate system. In the case of an incremental SfM pipeline, the process requires repeated model estimations based on detected feature points: homography, fundamental and essential matrices, as well as camera poses. These estimations have a crucial impact on the quality of 3D reconstruction. We propose to improve these estimations using the a contrario methodology. While SfM pipelines usually have globally-fixed thresholds for model estimation, the a contrario principle adapts thresholds to the input data and for each model estimation. Our experiments show that adaptive thresholds reach a significantly better precision. Additionally, the user is free from having to guess thresholds or to optimistically rely on default values. There are also cases where a globally-fixed threshold policy, whatever the threshold value is, cannot provide the best accuracy, contrary to an adaptive threshold policy. Despite significant advances in recent years, structure-from-motion (SfM) pipelines suffer from two important drawbacks. Apart from requiring significant computational power to solve the large-scale computations involved, such pipelines sometimes fail to correctly reconstruct when the accumulated error in incremental reconstruction is large or when the number of 3D to 2D correspondences are insufficient. In this paper we present a novel approach to mitigate the above-mentioned drawbacks. Using an image match graph based on matching features we partition the image data set into smaller sets or components which are reconstructed independently. Following such reconstructions we utilise the available epipolar relationships that connect images across components to correctly align the individual reconstructions in a global frame of reference. This results in both a significant speed up of at least one order of magnitude and also mitigates the problems of reconstruction failures with a marginal loss in accuracy. The effectiveness of our approach is demonstrated on some large-scale real world data sets.