3D reconstruction of complex structures with bundle adjustment: an incremental approach

Abstract — This paper introduces an incremental method for “Structure From Motion ” of complex scenes from a video se-quence. More precisely, we estimate the 3D positions of the viewed points in images and the camera positions and orientations through the sequence. The method can be seen as a fast but accurate alternative to classical reconstruction methods that use bundle adjustment, and that can become slow and computation time expensive for very long scenes. Our results are compared to the reconstruction obtained by the classical hierarchical bundle adjustment method. They have also been successfully used as a reference sequence for the vision based localization of an autonomous mobile robot. I