Robust SfM with Little Image Overlap
This addresses a bottleneck in 3D reconstruction for applications with sparse image sets, representing an incremental improvement over traditional SfM techniques.
The paper tackles the problem of Structure-from-Motion (SfM) in scenarios with minimal image overlap, such as only two images per scene part, by proposing a method based on line coplanarity hypotheses to estimate relative scales without trifocal information. Experiments show it successfully calibrates previously unmanageable datasets without sacrificing accuracy.
Usual Structure-from-Motion (SfM) techniques require at least trifocal overlaps to calibrate cameras and reconstruct a scene. We consider here scenarios of reduced image sets with little overlap, possibly as low as two images at most seeing the same part of the scene. We propose a new method, based on line coplanarity hypotheses, for estimating the relative scale of two independent bifocal calibrations sharing a camera, without the need of any trifocal information or Manhattan-world assumption. We use it to compute SfM in a chain of up-to-scale relative motions. For accuracy, we however also make use of trifocal information for line and/or point features, when present, relaxing usual trifocal constraints. For robustness to wrong assumptions and mismatches, we embed all constraints in a parameterless RANSAC-like approach. Experiments show that we can calibrate datasets that previously could not, and that this wider applicability does not come at the cost of inaccuracy.