Stable Structure from Motion for Unordered Image Collections

We present a non-incremental approach to structure from motion. Our solution is based on robustly computing global rotations from relative geometries and feeding these into the known-rotation framework to create an initial solution for bundle adjustment. To increase robustness we present a new method for constructing reliable point tracks from pairwise matches. We show that our method can be seen as maximizing the reliability of a point track if the quality of the weakest link in the track is used to evaluate reliability. To estimate the final geometry we alternate between bundle adjustment and a robust version of the known-rotation formulation. The ability to compute both structure and camera translations independent of initialization makes our algorithm insensitive to degenerate epipolar geometries. We demonstrate the performance of our system on a number of image collections.1

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2011
• Where: SCIA
• Authors: Carl Olsson, Olof Enqvist
• Keywords: Image Analysis, Image Collections, Initial Solution, Robust Version, SCIA 2011