We introduce the distributed camera model, a novel model for Structure-from-Motion (SfM). This model describes image observations in terms of light rays with ray origins and directions rather than pixels. As such, the proposed model is capable of describing a single camera or multiple cameras simultaneously as the collection of all light rays observed. We show how the distributed camera model is a generalization of the standard camera model and describe a general formulation and solution to the absolute camera pose problem that works for standard or distributed cameras. The proposed method computes a solution that is up to 8 times more efficient and robust to rotation singularities in comparison with gDLS. Finally, this method is used in an novel large-scale incremental SfM pipeline where distributed cameras are accurately and robustly merged together. This pipeline is a direct generalization of traditional incremental SfM; however, instead of incrementally adding one camera at a time to grow the reconstruction the reconstruction is grown by adding a distributed camera. Our pipeline produces highly accurate reconstructions efficiently by avoiding the need for many bundle adjustment iterations and is capable of computing a 3D model of Rome from over 15,000 images in just 22 minutes.
Since the seminal work of Phototourism @cite_27 , incremental SfM has been a popular pipeline for 3D reconstruction of unorganized photo collections. Robust open source solutions such as Bundler @cite_27 and VisualSfM exist @cite_1 using largely similar strategies to grow 3D models by successively adding one image at a time and carefully performing filtering and refinement. These pipelines have limited scalability but display excellent robustness and accuracy. In contrast, global SfM techniques @cite_2 @cite_13 @cite_32 are able to compute all camera poses simultaneously, leading to extremely efficient solvers for large-scale problems; however, these methods lack robustness and are typically less accurate than incremental SfM. Alternatively, hierarchical SfM methods compute 3D reconstructions by first breaking up the input images into clusters that are individually reconstructed then merged together into a common 3D coordinate system @cite_28 . Typically, bundle adjustment is run each time clusters are merged. This optimization ensures good accuracy and robustness but still a more scalable overall pipeline since fewer instances of bundle adjustment are performed compared to incremental SfM.
@cite_28 @cite_1 @cite_32 @cite_27 @cite_2 @cite_13
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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. We present a new structure from motion (Sfm) technique based on point and vanishing point (VP) matches in images. First, all global camera rotations are computed from VP matches as well as relative rotation estimates obtained from pairwise image matches. A new multi-staged linear technique is then used to estimate all camera translations and 3D points simultaneously. The proposed method involves first performing pairwise reconstructions, then robustly aligning these in pairs, and finally aligning all of them globally by simultaneously estimating their unknown relative scales and translations. In doing so, measurements inconsistent in three views are efficiently removed. Unlike sequential Sfm, the proposed method treats all images equally, is easy to parallelize and does not require intermediate bundle adjustments. There is also a reduction of drift and significant speedups up to two order of magnitude over sequential Sfm. We compare our method with a standard Sfm pipeline [1] and demonstrate that our linear estimates are accurate on a variety of datasets, and can serve as good initializations for final bundle adjustment. Because we exploit VPs when available, our approach is particularly well-suited to the reconstruction of man-made scenes. 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. 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.