This paper proposes a novel algorithm for multiview stereopsis that outputs a dense set of small rectangular patches covering the surfaces visible in the images. Stereopsis is implemented as a match, expand, and filter procedure, starting from a sparse set of matched keypoints, and repeatedly expanding these before using visibility constraints to filter away false matches. The keys to the performance of the proposed algorithm are effective techniques for enforcing local photometric consistency and global visibility constraints. Simple but effective methods are also proposed to turn the resulting patch model into a mesh which can be further refined by an algorithm that enforces both photometric consistency and regularization constraints. The proposed approach automatically detects and discards outliers and obstacles and does not require any initialization in the form of a visual hull, a bounding box, or valid depth ranges. We have tested our algorithm on various data sets including objects with fine surface details, deep concavities, and thin structures, outdoor scenes observed from a restricted set of viewpoints, and "crowded" scenes where moving obstacles appear in front of a static structure of interest. A quantitative evaluation on the Middlebury benchmark shows that the proposed method outperforms all others submitted so far for four out of the six data sets.

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o C To b E r 2 0 1 1 | vo L . 5 4 | N o. 1 0 | c o m m u n i c at i o n s o f t h e acm 105abstract We present a system that can reconstruct 3D geometry from large, unorganized collections of photographs such as those found by searching for a given city (e.g., Rome) on Internet photo-sharing sites. Our system is built on a set of new, distributed computer vision algorithms for image matching and 3D reconstruction, designed to maximize parallelism at each stage of the pipeline and to scale gracefully with both the size of the problem and the amount of available computation. Our experimental results demonstrate that it is now possible to reconstruct city-scale image collections with more than a hundred thousand images in less than a day. a This work was done when the author was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Washington. b Part of this work was done when the author was a graduate student at the University of Washington. 106 communications of t h e ac m | o C To bE r 2 0 1 1 | voL . 5 4 | No. 1 0 researchhighlights

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Multi-view stereo (MVS) algorithms now produce reconstructions that rival laser range scanner accuracy. However, stereo algorithms require textured surfaces, and therefore work poorly for many architectural scenes (e.g., building interiors with textureless, painted walls). This paper presents a novel MVS approach to overcome these limitations for Manhattan World scenes, i.e., scenes that consists of piece-wise planar surfaces with dominant directions. Given a set of calibrated photographs, we first reconstruct textured regions using an existing MVS algorithm, then extract dominant plane directions, generate plane hypotheses, and recover per-view depth maps using Markov random fields. We have tested our algorithm on several datasets ranging from office interiors to outdoor buildings, and demonstrate results that outperform the current state of the art for such texture-poor scenes.