The paper presents a system for automatic, geo-registered, real-time 3D reconstruction from video of urban scenes. The system collects video streams, as well as GPS and inertia measurements in order to place the reconstructed models in geo-registered coordinates. It is designed using current state of the art real-time modules for all processing steps. It employs commodity graphics hardware and standard CPU's to achieve real-time performance. We present the main considerations in designing the system and the steps of the processing pipeline. Our system extends existing algorithms to meet the robustness and variability necessary to operate out of the lab. To account for the large dynamic range of outdoor videos the processing pipeline estimates global camera gain changes in the feature tracking stage and efficiently compensates for these in stereo estimation without impacting the real-time performance. The required accuracy for many applications is achieved with a twostep stereo reconstruction process exploiting the redundancy across frames. We show results on real video sequences comprising hundreds of thousands of frames.

Abstract. This paper introduces an approach for dense 3D reconstruction from unregistered Internet-scale photo collections with about 3 million images within the span of a day on a single PC ("cloudless"). Our method advances image clustering, stereo, stereo fusion and structure from motion to achieve high computational performance. We leverage geometric and appearance constraints to obtain a highly parallel implementation on modern graphics processors and multi-core architectures. This leads to two orders of magnitude higher performance on an order of magnitude larger dataset than competing state-of-the-art approaches.

The paper introduces a data collection system and a processing pipeline for automatic geo-registered 3D reconstruction of urban scenes from video. The system collects multiple video streams, as well as GPS and INS measurements in order to place the reconstructed models in georegistered coordinates. Besides high quality in terms of both geometry and appearance, we aim at real-time performance. Even though our processing pipeline is currently far from being real-time, we select techniques and we design processing modules that can achieve fast performance on multiple CPUs and GPUs aiming at real-time performance in the near future. We present the main considerations in designing the system and the steps of the processing pipeline. We show results on real video sequences captured by our system.

Abstract

In this paper we present a novel system for realtime, six degree of freedom visual simultaneous localization and mapping using a stereo camera as the only sensor. The system makes extensive use of parallelism both on the graphics processor and through multiple CPU threads. Working together these threads achieve real-time feature tracking, visual odometry, loop detection and global map correction using bundle adjustment. The resulting corrections are fed back into to the visual odometry system to limit its drift over long sequences. We demonstrate our system on a series videos from challenging indoor environments with moving occluders, visually homogenous regions with few features, scene parts with large changes in lighting and fast camera motion. The total system performs its task of global map building in real time including loop detection and bundle adjustment on typical office building scale scenes.