View-graph Selection Framework for SfM

Rajvi Shah, Visesh Chari, P J Narayanan; Proceedings of the European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2018, pp. 535-550

View-graph is an essential input to large-scale structure from motion (SfM) pipelines. Accuracy and efficiency of large-scale SfM is crucially dependent on the input view-graph. Inconsistent or inaccurate edges can lead to inferior or wrong reconstruction. Most SfM methods remove `undesirable' images and pairs using several fixed heuristic criteria, and propose tailor-made solutions to achieve specific reconstruction objectives such as efficiency, accuracy, or disambiguation. In contrast to these disparate solutions, we propose an optimization based formulation that can be used to achieve these different reconstruction objectives with task-specific cost modeling that uses and construct a very efficient network flow based formulation for its approximate solution. The abstraction brought on by this selection mechanism separates the challenges specific to datasets and reconstruction objectives from the standard SfM pipeline and improves its generalization. This paper mainly focuses on application of this framework with standard SfM pipeline for accurate and ghost-free reconstructions of highly ambiguous datasets. To model selection costs for this task, we introduce new disambiguation priors based on local geometry. We further demonstrate versatility of the method by using it for the general objective of accurate and efficient reconstruction of large-scale Internet datasets using costs based on well-known SfM priors.