Street View Motion-from-Structure-from-Motion

We describe a structure-from-motion framework that handles “generalized ” cameras, such as moving rolling-shutter cameras, and works at an unprecedented scale— billions of images covering millions of linear kilometers of roads—by exploiting a good relative pose prior along vehicle paths. We exhibit a planet-scale, appearance-augmented point cloud constructed with our framework and demonstrate its practical use in correcting the pose of a street-level image collection. 1

Towards High-Frequency Tracking and Fast Edge-Aware Optimization

This dissertation advances the state of the art for AR/VR tracking systems by increasing the tracking frequency by orders of magnitude and proposes an efficient algorithm for the problem of edge-aware optimization. AR/VR is a natural way of interacting with computers, where the physical and digital worlds coexist. We are on the cusp of a radical change in how humans perform and interact with computing. Humans are sensitive to small misalignments between the real and the virtual world, and tracking at kilo-Hertz frequencies becomes essential. Current vision-based systems fall short, as their tracking frequency is implicitly limited by the frame-rate of the camera. This thesis presents a prototype system which can track at orders of magnitude higher than the state-of-the-art methods using multiple commodity cameras. The proposed system exploits characteristics of the camera traditionally considered as flaws, namely rolling shutter and radial distortion. The experimental evaluation shows the effectiveness of the method for various degrees of motion. Furthermore, edge-aware optimization is an indispensable tool in the computer vision arsenal for accurate filtering of depth-data and image-based rendering, which is increasingly being used for content creation and geometry processing for AR/VR. As applications increasingly demand higher resolution and speed, there exists a need to develop methods that scale accordingly. This dissertation proposes such an edge-aware optimization framework which is efficient, accurate, and algorithmically scales well, all of which are much desirable traits not found jointly in the state of the art. The experiments show the effectiveness of the framework in a multitude of computer vision tasks such as computational photography and stereo.Comment: PhD thesi

Structure and motion estimation from rolling shutter video

The majority of consumer quality cameras sold today have CMOS sensors with rolling shutters. In a rolling shutter camera, images are read out row by row, and thus each row is exposed during a different time interval. A rolling-shutter exposure causes geometric image distortions when either the camera or the scene is moving, and this causes state-of-the-art structure and motion algorithms to fail. We demonstrate a novel method for solving the structure and motion problem for rolling-shutter video. The method relies on exploiting the continuity of the camera motion, both between frames, and across a frame. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method by controlled experiments on real video sequences. We show, both visually and quantitatively, that our method outperforms standard structure and motion, and is more accurate and efficient than a two-step approach, doing image rectification and structure and motion

Self-Supervised Scene Dynamic Recovery from Rolling Shutter Images and Events

Scene Dynamic Recovery (SDR) by inverting distorted Rolling Shutter (RS) images to an undistorted high frame-rate Global Shutter (GS) video is a severely ill-posed problem, particularly when prior knowledge about camera/object motions is unavailable. Commonly used artificial assumptions on motion linearity and data-specific characteristics, regarding the temporal dynamics information embedded in the RS scanlines, are prone to producing sub-optimal solutions in real-world scenarios. To address this challenge, we propose an event-based RS2GS framework within a self-supervised learning paradigm that leverages the extremely high temporal resolution of event cameras to provide accurate inter/intra-frame information. % In this paper, we propose to leverage the event camera to provide inter/intra-frame information as the emitted events have an extremely high temporal resolution and learn an event-based RS2GS network within a self-supervised learning framework, where real-world events and RS images can be exploited to alleviate the performance degradation caused by the domain gap between the synthesized and real data. Specifically, an Event-based Inter/intra-frame Compensator (E-IC) is proposed to predict the per-pixel dynamic between arbitrary time intervals, including the temporal transition and spatial translation. Exploring connections in terms of RS-RS, RS-GS, and GS-RS, we explicitly formulate mutual constraints with the proposed E-IC, resulting in supervisions without ground-truth GS images. Extensive evaluations over synthetic and real datasets demonstrate that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art and shows remarkable performance for event-based RS2GS inversion in real-world scenarios. The dataset and code are available at https://w3un.github.io/selfunroll/

Digital Video Stabilization

Ph.DDOCTOR OF PHILOSOPH