{Vid2Curve}: {S}imultaneous Camera Motion Estimation and Thin Structure Reconstruction from an {RGB} Video

Thin structures, such as wire-frame sculptures, fences, cables, power lines, and tree branches, are common in the real world. It is extremely challenging to acquire their 3D digital models using traditional image-based or depth-based reconstruction methods because thin structures often lack distinct point features and have severe self-occlusion. We propose the first approach that simultaneously estimates camera motion and reconstructs the geometry of complex 3D thin structures in high quality from a color video captured by a handheld camera. Specifically, we present a new curve-based approach to estimate accurate camera poses by establishing correspondences between featureless thin objects in the foreground in consecutive video frames, without requiring visual texture in the background scene to lock on. Enabled by this effective curve-based camera pose estimation strategy, we develop an iterative optimization method with tailored measures on geometry, topology as well as self-occlusion handling for reconstructing 3D thin structures. Extensive validations on a variety of thin structures show that our method achieves accurate camera pose estimation and faithful reconstruction of 3D thin structures with complex shape and topology at a level that has not been attained by other existing reconstruction methods

Vid2Curve: Simultaneous Camera Motion Estimation and Thin Structure Reconstruction from an RGB Video

Thin structures, such as wire-frame sculptures, fences, cables, power lines, and tree branches, are common in the real world. It is extremely challenging to acquire their 3D digital models using traditional image-based or depth-based reconstruction methods because thin structures often lack distinct point features and have severe self-occlusion. We propose the first approach that simultaneously estimates camera motion and reconstructs the geometry of complex 3D thin structures in high quality from a color video captured by a handheld camera. Specifically, we present a new curve-based approach to estimate accurate camera poses by establishing correspondences between featureless thin objects in the foreground in consecutive video frames, without requiring visual texture in the background scene to lock on. Enabled by this effective curve-based camera pose estimation strategy, we develop an iterative optimization method with tailored measures on geometry, topology as well as self-occlusion handling for reconstructing 3D thin structures. Extensive validations on a variety of thin structures show that our method achieves accurate camera pose estimation and faithful reconstruction of 3D thin structures with complex shape and topology at a level that has not been attained by other existing reconstruction methods.Comment: Accepted by SIGGRAPH 202

Multi-Scale 3D Scene Flow from Binocular Stereo Sequences

Scene flow methods estimate the three-dimensional motion field for points in the world, using multi-camera video data. Such methods combine multi-view reconstruction with motion estimation. This paper describes an alternative formulation for dense scene flow estimation that provides reliable results using only two cameras by fusing stereo and optical flow estimation into a single coherent framework. Internally, the proposed algorithm generates probability distributions for optical flow and disparity. Taking into account the uncertainty in the intermediate stages allows for more reliable estimation of the 3D scene flow than previous methods allow. To handle the aperture problems inherent in the estimation of optical flow and disparity, a multi-scale method along with a novel region-based technique is used within a regularized solution. This combined approach both preserves discontinuities and prevents over-regularization – two problems commonly associated with the basic multi-scale approaches. Experiments with synthetic and real test data demonstrate the strength of the proposed approach.National Science Foundation (CNS-0202067, IIS-0208876); Office of Naval Research (N00014-03-1-0108

Dense real-time 3D reconstruction from multiple images

The rapid increase in computer graphics and acquisition technologies has led to the widespread use of 3D models. Techniques for 3D reconstruction from multiple views aim to recover the structure of a scene and the position and orientation (motion) of the camera using only the geometrical constraints in 2D images. This problem, known as Structure from Motion (SfM) has been the focus of a great deal of research effort in recent years; however, the automatic, dense, real-time and accurate reconstruction of a scene is still a major research challenge. This thesis presents work that targets the development of efficient algorithms to produce high quality and accurate reconstructions, introducing new computer vision techniques for camera motion calibration, dense SfM reconstruction and dense real-time 3D reconstruction. In SfM, a second challenge is to build an effective reconstruction framework that provides dense and high quality surface modelling. This thesis develops a complete, automatic and flexible system with a simple user-interface of `raw images to 3D surface representation'. As part of the proposed image reconstruction approach, this thesis introduces an accurate and reliable region-growing algorithm to propagate the dense matching points from the sparse key points among all stereo pairs. This dense 3D reconstruction proposal addresses the deficiencies of existing SfM systems built on sparsely distributed 3D point clouds which are insufficient for reconstructing a complete 3D model of a scene. The existing SfM reconstruction methods perform a bundle adjustment optimization of the global geometry in order to obtain an accurate model. Such an optimization is very computational expensive and cannot be implemented in a real-time application. Extended Kalman Filter (EKF) Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) considers the problem of concurrently estimating in real-time the structure of the surrounding world, perceived by moving sensors (cameras), simultaneously localizing in it. However, standard EKF-SLAM techniques are susceptible to errors introduced during the state prediction and measurement prediction linearization.

FlowCam: Training Generalizable 3D Radiance Fields without Camera Poses via Pixel-Aligned Scene Flow

Reconstruction of 3D neural fields from posed images has emerged as a promising method for self-supervised representation learning. The key challenge preventing the deployment of these 3D scene learners on large-scale video data is their dependence on precise camera poses from structure-from-motion, which is prohibitively expensive to run at scale. We propose a method that jointly reconstructs camera poses and 3D neural scene representations online and in a single forward pass. We estimate poses by first lifting frame-to-frame optical flow to 3D scene flow via differentiable rendering, preserving locality and shift-equivariance of the image processing backbone. SE(3) camera pose estimation is then performed via a weighted least-squares fit to the scene flow field. This formulation enables us to jointly supervise pose estimation and a generalizable neural scene representation via re-rendering the input video, and thus, train end-to-end and fully self-supervised on real-world video datasets. We demonstrate that our method performs robustly on diverse, real-world video, notably on sequences traditionally challenging to optimization-based pose estimation techniques.Comment: Project website: http://cameronosmith.github.io/flowca

Structureless Camera Motion Estimation of Unordered Omnidirectional Images

This work aims at providing a novel camera motion estimation pipeline from large collections of unordered omnidirectional images. In oder to keep the pipeline as general and flexible as possible, cameras are modelled as unit spheres, allowing to incorporate any central camera type. For each camera an unprojection lookup is generated from intrinsics, which is called P2S-map (Pixel-to-Sphere-map), mapping pixels to their corresponding positions on the unit sphere. Consequently the camera geometry becomes independent of the underlying projection model. The pipeline also generates P2S-maps from world map projections with less distortion effects as they are known from cartography. Using P2S-maps from camera calibration and world map projection allows to convert omnidirectional camera images to an appropriate world map projection in oder to apply standard feature extraction and matching algorithms for data association. The proposed estimation pipeline combines the flexibility of SfM (Structure from Motion) - which handles unordered image collections - with the efficiency of PGO (Pose Graph Optimization), which is used as back-end in graph-based Visual SLAM (Simultaneous Localization and Mapping) approaches to optimize camera poses from large image sequences. SfM uses BA (Bundle Adjustment) to jointly optimize camera poses (motion) and 3d feature locations (structure), which becomes computationally expensive for large-scale scenarios. On the contrary PGO solves for camera poses (motion) from measured transformations between cameras, maintaining optimization managable. The proposed estimation algorithm combines both worlds. It obtains up-to-scale transformations between image pairs using two-view constraints, which are jointly scaled using trifocal constraints. A pose graph is generated from scaled two-view transformations and solved by PGO to obtain camera motion efficiently even for large image collections. Obtained results can be used as input data to provide initial pose estimates for further 3d reconstruction purposes e.g. to build a sparse structure from feature correspondences in an SfM or SLAM framework with further refinement via BA. The pipeline also incorporates fixed extrinsic constraints from multi-camera setups as well as depth information provided by RGBD sensors. The entire camera motion estimation pipeline does not need to generate a sparse 3d structure of the captured environment and thus is called SCME (Structureless Camera Motion Estimation).:1 Introduction 1.1 Motivation 1.1.1 Increasing Interest of Image-Based 3D Reconstruction 1.1.2 Underground Environments as Challenging Scenario 1.1.3 Improved Mobile Camera Systems for Full Omnidirectional Imaging 1.2 Issues 1.2.1 Directional versus Omnidirectional Image Acquisition 1.2.2 Structure from Motion versus Visual Simultaneous Localization and Mapping 1.3 Contribution 1.4 Structure of this Work 2 Related Work 2.1 Visual Simultaneous Localization and Mapping 2.1.1 Visual Odometry 2.1.2 Pose Graph Optimization 2.2 Structure from Motion 2.2.1 Bundle Adjustment 2.2.2 Structureless Bundle Adjustment 2.3 Corresponding Issues 2.4 Proposed Reconstruction Pipeline 3 Cameras and Pixel-to-Sphere Mappings with P2S-Maps 3.1 Types 3.2 Models 3.2.1 Unified Camera Model 3.2.2 Polynomal Camera Model 3.2.3 Spherical Camera Model 3.3 P2S-Maps - Mapping onto Unit Sphere via Lookup Table 3.3.1 Lookup Table as Color Image 3.3.2 Lookup Interpolation 3.3.3 Depth Data Conversion 4 Calibration 4.1 Overview of Proposed Calibration Pipeline 4.2 Target Detection 4.3 Intrinsic Calibration 4.3.1 Selected Examples 4.4 Extrinsic Calibration 4.4.1 3D-2D Pose Estimation 4.4.2 2D-2D Pose Estimation 4.4.3 Pose Optimization 4.4.4 Uncertainty Estimation 4.4.5 PoseGraph Representation 4.4.6 Bundle Adjustment 4.4.7 Selected Examples 5 Full Omnidirectional Image Projections 5.1 Panoramic Image Stitching 5.2 World Map Projections 5.3 World Map Projection Generator for P2S-Maps 5.4 Conversion between Projections based on P2S-Maps 5.4.1 Proposed Workflow 5.4.2 Data Storage Format 5.4.3 Real World Example 6 Relations between Two Camera Spheres 6.1 Forward and Backward Projection 6.2 Triangulation 6.2.1 Linear Least Squares Method 6.2.2 Alternative Midpoint Method 6.3 Epipolar Geometry 6.4 Transformation Recovery from Essential Matrix 6.4.1 Cheirality 6.4.2 Standard Procedure 6.4.3 Simplified Procedure 6.4.4 Improved Procedure 6.5 Two-View Estimation 6.5.1 Evaluation Strategy 6.5.2 Error Metric 6.5.3 Evaluation of Estimation Algorithms 6.5.4 Concluding Remarks 6.6 Two-View Optimization 6.6.1 Epipolar-Based Error Distances 6.6.2 Projection-Based Error Distances 6.6.3 Comparison between Error Distances 6.7 Two-View Translation Scaling 6.7.1 Linear Least Squares Estimation 6.7.2 Non-Linear Least Squares Optimization 6.7.3 Comparison between Initial and Optimized Scaling Factor 6.8 Homography to Identify Degeneracies 6.8.1 Homography for Spherical Cameras 6.8.2 Homography Estimation 6.8.3 Homography Optimization 6.8.4 Homography and Pure Rotation 6.8.5 Homography in Epipolar Geometry 7 Relations between Three Camera Spheres 7.1 Three View Geometry 7.2 Crossing Epipolar Planes Geometry 7.3 Trifocal Geometry 7.4 Relation between Trifocal, Three-View and Crossing Epipolar Planes 7.5 Translation Ratio between Up-To-Scale Two-View Transformations 7.5.1 Structureless Determination Approaches 7.5.2 Structure-Based Determination Approaches 7.5.3 Comparison between Proposed Approaches 8 Pose Graphs 8.1 Optimization Principle 8.2 Solvers 8.2.1 Additional Graph Solvers 8.2.2 False Loop Closure Detection 8.3 Pose Graph Generation 8.3.1 Generation of Synthetic Pose Graph Data 8.3.2 Optimization of Synthetic Pose Graph Data 9 Structureless Camera Motion Estimation 9.1 SCME Pipeline 9.2 Determination of Two-View Translation Scale Factors 9.3 Integration of Depth Data 9.4 Integration of Extrinsic Camera Constraints 10 Camera Motion Estimation Results 10.1 Directional Camera Images 10.2 Omnidirectional Camera Images 11 Conclusion 11.1 Summary 11.2 Outlook and Future Work Appendices A.1 Additional Extrinsic Calibration Results A.2 Linear Least Squares Scaling A.3 Proof Rank Deficiency A.4 Alternative Derivation Midpoint Method A.5 Simplification of Depth Calculation A.6 Relation between Epipolar and Circumferential Constraint A.7 Covariance Estimation A.8 Uncertainty Estimation from Epipolar Geometry A.9 Two-View Scaling Factor Estimation: Uncertainty Estimation A.10 Two-View Scaling Factor Optimization: Uncertainty Estimation A.11 Depth from Adjoining Two-View Geometries A.12 Alternative Three-View Derivation A.12.1 Second Derivation Approach A.12.2 Third Derivation Approach A.13 Relation between Trifocal Geometry and Alternative Midpoint Method A.14 Additional Pose Graph Generation Examples A.15 Pose Graph Solver Settings A.16 Additional Pose Graph Optimization Examples Bibliograph

A flexible and versatile studio for synchronized multi-view video recording

In recent years, the convergence of Computer Vision and Computer Graphics has put forth new research areas that work on scene reconstruction from and analysis of multi-view video footage. In free-viewpoint video, for example, new views of a scene are generated from an arbitrary viewpoint in real-time from a set of real multi-view input video streams. The analysis of real-world scenes from multi-view video to extract motion information or reflection models is another field of research that greatly benefits from high-quality input data. Building a recording setup for multi-view video involves a great effort on the hardware as well as the software side. The amount of image data to be processed is huge, a decent lighting and camera setup is essential for a naturalistic scene appearance and robust background subtraction, and the computing infrastructure has to enable real-time processing of the recorded material. This paper describes the recording setup for multi-view video acquisition that enables the synchronized recording of dynamic scenes from multiple camera positions under controlled conditions. The requirements to the room and their implementation in the separate components of the studio are described in detail. The efficiency and flexibility of the room is demonstrated on the basis of the results that we obtain with a real-time 3D scene reconstruction system, a system for non-intrusive optical motion capture and a model-based free-viewpoint video system for human actors.

Assessment of Structure from Motion for Reconnaissance Augmentation and Bandwidth Usage Reduction

Modern militaries rely upon remote image sensors for real-time intelligence. A typical remote system consists of an unmanned aerial vehicle, or UAV, with an attached camera. A video stream is sent from the UAV, through a bandwidth-constrained satellite connection, to an intelligence processing unit. In this research, an upgrade to this method of collection is proposed. A set of synthetic images of a scene captured by a UAV in a virtual environment is sent to a pipeline of computer vision algorithms, collectively known as Structure from Motion. The output of Structure from Motion, a three-dimensional model, is then assessed in a 3D virtual world as a possible replacement for the images from which it was created. This study shows Structure from Motion results from a modifiable spiral flight path and compares the geoaccuracy of each result. A flattening of height is observed, and an automated compensation for this flattening is performed. Each reconstruction is also compressed, and the size of the compression is compared with the compressed size of the images from which it was created. A reduction of 49-60% of required space is shown