Multi-view stereo for community photo collections

Multi-view stereo for community photo collections
Michael Goesele, Noah Snavely, Brian Curless, Hugues Hoppe, Steven Seitz.
IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV) 2007.
Detailed 3D models reconstructed from crawled Internet images.
Abstract: We present a multi-view stereo algorithm that addresses the extreme changes in lighting, scale, clutter, and other effects in large online community photo collections. Our idea is to intelligently choose images to match, both at a per-view and per-pixel level. We show that such adaptive view selection enables robust performance even with dramatic appearance variability. The stereo matching technique takes as input sparse 3D points reconstructed from structure-from-motion methods and iteratively grows surfaces from these points. Optimizing for surface normals within a photoconsistency measure significantly improves the matching results. While the focus of our approach is to estimate high-quality depth maps, we also show examples of merging the resulting depth maps into compelling scene reconstructions. We demonstrate our algorithm on standard multi-view stereo datasets and on casually acquired photo collections of famous scenes gathered from the Internet.
Hindsights: One application may be to provide useful 3D impostors to improve view interpolation for image-based rendering systems like Photosynth.