It is well known that the problem of camera pose estimation with unknown focal length has 7 degrees of freedom. Since each image point gives 2 constraints, solving this problem requires a minimum of 3.5 image points of 4 known 3D points, where 0.5 means either x or y coordinate of an image point. We refer to this minimal problem as P3.5P. However, the existing methods require 4 full image points to solve the camera pose and focal length [21, 1, 3, 23]. In this paper, we present a general solution to the true minimal P3.5P problem with up to 10 solutions. The remaining image coordinate is then used to filter the candidate solutions, which typically results in a single solution for good data or no solution for outliers. Experiments show the proposed method significantly improves the efficiency over the state of the art methods while maintaining a high accuracy.

This paper proposes a new incremental structure from motion (SfM) algorithm based on a novel structure-less camera resection technique. Traditional methods rely on 2D-3D correspondences to compute the pose of candidate cameras using PnP. In this work, we take the collection of already reconstructed cameras as a generalized camera, and determine the absolute pose of a candidate pinhole camera from pure 2D correspondences, which we call it semi-generalized camera pose problem. We present the minimal solvers of the new problem for both calibrated and partially calibrated (unknown focal length) pinhole cameras. By integrating these new algorithms in an incremental SfM system, we go beyond the state-of-art methods with the capability of reconstructing cameras without 2D-3D correspondences. Large-scale real image experiments show that our new SfM system significantly improves the completeness of 3D reconstruction over the standard approach.

We address the problem of geo-registering ground-based multi-view stereo models by ground-to-aerial image matching. The main contribution is a fully automated geo-registration pipeline with a novel viewpoint-dependent matching method that handles ground to aerial viewpoint variation. We conduct large-scale experiments which consist of many popular outdoor landmarks in Rome. The proposed approach demonstrates a high success rate for the task, and dramatically outperforms state-of-the-art techniques, yielding geo-registration at pixel-level accuracy.

In this paper, we study the configurations of motion and structure that lead to inherent ambiguities in radial distortion estimation (or 3D reconstruction with unknown radial distortions). By analyzing the motion field of radially distorted images, we solve for critical surface pairs that can lead to the same motion field under different radial distortions and possibly different camera motions. We study the properties of the discovered critical configurations and discuss the practically important configurations that often occur in real applications. We demonstrate the impact of the radial distortion ambiguity on multi-view reconstruction with synthetic experiments and real experiments.

The time complexity of incremental structure from motion (SfM) is often known as O(n^4) with respect to the number of cameras. As bundle adjustment (BA) being significantly improved recently by preconditioned conjugate gradient (PCG), it is worth revisiting how fast incremental SfM is. We introduce a novel BA strategy that provides good balance between speed and accuracy. Through algorithm analysis and extensive experiments, we show that incremental SfM requires only O(n) time on many major steps including BA. Our method maintains high accuracy by regularly re-triangulating the feature matches that initially fail to triangulate. We test our algorithm on large photo collections and long video sequences with various settings, and show that our method offers state of the art performance for large-scale reconstructions. The presented algorithm is available as part of VisualSFM at http://homes.cs.washington.edu/~ccwu/vsfm/.

This paper introduces a schematic representation for architectural scenes together with robust algorithms for reconstruction from sparse 3D point cloud data. The schematic models architecture as a network of transport curves, approximating a floorplan, with associated profile curves, together comprising an interconnected set of swept surfaces. The representation is extremely concise, composed of a handful of planar curves, and easily interpretable by humans. The approach also provides a principled mechanism for interpolating a dense surface, and enables filling in holes in the data, by means of a pipeline that employs a global optimization over all parameters. By incorporating a displacement map on top of the schematic surface, it is possible to recover fine details. Experiments show the ability to reconstruct extremely clean and simple models from sparse structure-from-motion point clouds of complex architectural scenes.

We present the design and implementation of new inexact Newton type Bundle Adjustment algorithms that exploit hardware parallelism for efficiently solving large scale 3D scene reconstruction problems. We explore the use of multicore CPU as well as multicore GPUs for this purpose. We show that overcoming the severe memory and bandwidth limitations of current generation GPUs not only leads to more space efficient algorithms, but also to surprising savings in runtime. Our CPU based system is up to ten times and our GPU based system is up to thirty times faster than the current state of the art methods, while maintaining comparable convergence behavior. The code and additional results are available at http://grail.cs.washington.edu/projects/mcba.

This paper presents a novel approach for dense reconstruction from a single-view of a repetitive scene structure. Given an image and its detected repetition regions, we model the shape recovery as the dense pixel correspondences within a single image. The correspondences are represented by an interval map that tells the distance of each pixel to its matched pixels within the single image. In order to obtain dense repetitive structures, we develop a new repetition constraint that penalizes the inconsistency between the repetition intervals of the dynamically corresponding pixel pairs. We deploy a graph-cut to balance between the high-level constraint of geometric repetition and the low-level constraints of photometric consistency and spatial smoothness. We demonstrate the accurate reconstruction of dense 3D repetitive structures through a variety of experiments, which prove the robustness of our approach to outliers such as structure variations, illumination changes, and occlusions.

This paper describes an approach for mobile robot localization using a visual word based place recognition approach. In our approach we exploit the benefits of a stereo camera system for place recognition. Visual words computed from SIFT features are combined with VIP (viewpoint invariant patches) features that use depth information from the stereo setup. The approach was evaluated under the ImageCLEF@ICPR 2010 competition. The results achieved on the competition datasets are published in this paper.

The robust alignment of images and scenes seen from widely different viewpoints is an important challenge for camera and scene reconstruction. This paper introduces a novel class of viewpoint independent local features for robust registration and novel algorithms to use the rich information of the new features for 3D scene alignment and large scale scene reconstruction. The key point of our approach consists of leveraging local shape information for the extraction of an invariant feature descriptor. The advantages of the novel viewpoint invariant patch (VIP) are: that the novel features are invariant to 3D camera motion and that a single VIP correspondence uniquely defines the 3D similarity transformation between two scenes. In the paper we demonstrate how to use the properties of the VIPs in an efficient matching scheme for 3D scene alignment. The algorithm is based on a hierarchical matching method which tests the components of the similarity transformation sequentially to allow efficient matching and 3D scene alignment. We evaluate the novel features on real data with known ground truth information and show that the features can be used to reconstruct large scale urban scenes.

A new algorithm for stereo correspondence and surface reconstruction is presented in this paper. We advance the stripe as the matching primitive. The stripe is a special kind of region composed of some adjacent similar scanline segments. Each input image is segmented into stripes and then converted to a stripe adjacency graph. Our method matches stripes and stripe adjacencies globally and adaptively, with stripes being merged or split according to the disparity estimates. A pair of matched stripes constructs a surface patch, and, correspondingly, a pair of matched subgraph presents a smooth surface. Experimental results show that our algorithm is fast and effective.