Localizing an image w.r.t. a 3D scene model represents a core task for many computer vision applications. An increasing number of real-world applications of visual localization on mobile devices, e.g., Augmented Reality or autonomous robots such as drones or self-driving cars, demand localization approaches to minimize storage and bandwidth requirements. Compressing the 3D models used for localization thus becomes a practical necessity. In this work, we introduce a new hybrid compression algorithm that uses a given memory limit in a more effective way. Rather than treating all 3D points equally, it represents a small set of points with full appearance information and an additional, larger set of points with compressed information. This enables our approach to obtain a more complete scene representation without increasing the memory requirements, leading to a superior performance compared to previous compression schemes. As part of our contribution, we show how to handle ambiguous matches arising from point compression during RANSAC. Besides outperforming previous compression techniques in terms of pose accuracy under the same memory constraints, our compression scheme itself is also more efficient. Furthermore, the localization rates and accuracy obtained with our approach are comparable to state-of-the-art feature-based methods, while using a small fraction of the memory.

In this paper, we aim to solve the pose estimation problem of calibrated pinhole and generalized cameras w.r.t. a Structure-from-Motion (SfM) model by leveraging both 2D-3D correspondences as well as 2D-2D correspondences. Traditional approaches either focus on the use of 2D-3D matches, known as structure-based pose estimation or solely on 2D-2D matches (structure-less pose estimation). Absolute pose approaches are limited in their performance by the quality of the 3D point triangulations as well as the completeness of the 3D model. Relative pose approaches, on the other hand, while being more accurate, also tend to be far more computationally costly and often return dozens of possible solutions. This work aims to bridge the gap between these two paradigms. We propose a new RANSAC-based approach that automatically chooses the best type of solver to use at each iteration in a data-driven way. The solvers chosen by our RANSAC can range from pure structure-based or structure-less solvers, to any possible combination of hybrid solvers (i.e. using both types of matches) in between. A number of these new hybrid minimal solvers are also presented in this paper. Both synthetic and real data experiments show our approach to be as accurate as structure-less approaches, while staying close to the efficiency of structure-based methods.

Localizing a query image against a 3D model at large scale is a hard problem, since 2D-3D matches become more and more ambiguous as the model size increases. This creates a need for pose estimation strategies that can handle very low inlier ratios. In this paper, we draw new insights on the geometric information available from the 2D-3D matching process. As modern descriptors are not invariant against large variations in viewpoint, we are able to find the rays in space used to triangulate a given point that are closest to a query descriptor. It is well known that two correspondences constrain the camera to lie on the surface of a torus. Adding the knowledge of direction of triangulation, we are able to approximate the position of the camera from two matches alone. We derive a geometric solver that can compute this position in under 1 microsecond. Using this solver, we propose a simple yet powerful outlier filter which scales quadratically in the number of matches. We validate the accuracy of our solver and demonstrate the usefulness of our method in real world settings.

We propose a novel two-step method for estimating the intrinsic and extrinsic calibration of any radially symmetric camera, including non-central systems. The first step consists of estimating the camera pose, given a Structure from Motion (SfM) model, up to the translation along the optical axis. As a second step, we obtain the calibration by finding the translation of the camera center using an ordering constraint. The method makes use of the 1D radial camera model, which allows us to effectively handle any radially symmetric camera, including non-central ones. Using this ordering constraint, we show that the we are able to calibrate several different (central and non-central) Wide Field of View (WFOV) cameras, including fisheye, hyper-catadioptric and spherical catadioptric cameras, as well as pinhole cameras, using a single image or jointly solving for several views.

This work presents a method for increasing the accuracy of standard visual inertial odometry (VIO) by effectively removing the angular drift that naturally occurs in feature-based VIO. In order to eliminate such drift, we propose to leverage the predominance of parallel lines in man-made environments by using the intersection of their image projections, known as vanishing points (VPs). First, an efficient inertial-based method is presented that accurately and efficiently detects such points. Second, a strategy to deal with these measurements within the framework of an EKF-based VIO system is presented. Furthermore, special care is taken in order to ensure the real-time execution of the estimator in order to comply with time-critical applications running on computationally constrained platforms. Experiments are performed in a mobile device on challenging environments and evaluated against the same VIO system without the use of VPs, demonstrating the superior accuracy when employing the proposed framework.

In this paper, we propose a complete on-device 3D reconstruction pipeline for mobile monocular hand-held devices, which generates dense 3D models with absolute scale on-site while simultaneously supplying the user with real-time interactive feedback. The method fills a gap in current cloud-based mobile reconstruction services as it ensures at capture time that the acquired image set fulfills desired quality and completeness criteria. In contrast to existing systems, the developed framework offers multiple innovative solutions. In particular, we investigate the usability of the available on-device inertial sensors to make the tracking and mapping process more resilient to rapid motions and to estimate the metric scale of the captured scene. Moreover, we propose an efficient and accurate scheme for dense stereo matching which allows to reduce the processing time to interactive speed. We demonstrate the performance of the reconstruction pipeline on multiple challenging indoor and outdoor scenes of different size and depth variability.