. We describe progress in completely automatically recovering 3D scene structure together with 3D camera positions from a sequence of images acquired by an unknown camera undergoing unknown movement. The main departure from previous structure from motion strategies is that processing is not sequential. Instead a hierarchical approach is employed building from image triplets and associated trifocal tensors. This is advantageous both in obtaining correspondences and also in optimally distributing error over the sequence. The major step forward is that closed sequences can now be dealt with easily. That is, sequences where part of a scene is revisited at a later stage in the sequence. Such sequences contain additional constraints, compared to open sequences, from which the reconstruction can now benefit. The computed cameras and structure are the backbone of a system to build texture mapped graphical models directly from image sequences. 1 Introduction The goal of this work is to obtain ...

In this paper the theoretical and practical feasibility of self-calibration in the presence of varying intrinsic camera parameters is under investigation. The paper’s main contribution is to propose a self-calibration method which efficiently deals with all kinds of constraints on the intrinsic camera parameters. Within this framework a practical method is proposed which can retrieve metric reconstruction from image sequences obtained with uncalibrated zooming/focusing cameras. The feasibility of the approach is illustrated on real and synthetic examples. Besides this a theoretical proof is given which shows that the absence of skew in the image plane is sufficient to allow for self-calibration. A counting argument is developed which—depending on the set of constraints—gives the minimum sequence length for self-calibration and a method to detect critical motion sequences is proposed.

This paper describes a theory and a practical algorithm for the autocalibration of a moving projective camera, from views of a planar scene. The unknown camera calibration, and (up to scale) the unknown scene geometry and camera motion are recovered from the hypothesis that the camera’s internal parameters remain constant during the motion. This work extends the various existing methods for non-planar autocalibration to a practically common situation in which it is not possible to bootstrap the calibration from an intermediate projective reconstruction. It also extends Hartley’s method for the internal calibration of a rotating camera, to allow camera translation and to provide 3D as well as calibration information. The basic constraint is that the projections of orthogonal direction vectors (points at infinity) in the plane must be orthogonal in the calibrated camera frame of each image. Abstractly, since the two circular points of the 3D plane (representing its Euclidean structure) lie on the 3D absolute conic, their projections into each image must lie on the absolute conic’s image (representing the camera calibration). The resulting numerical algorithm optimizes this constraint over all circular points and projective calibration parameters, using the inter-image homographies as a projective scene representation.

Abstract. In this paper, sequences of camera motions that lead to inherent ambiguities in uncalibrated Euclidean reconstruction or self-calibration are studied. Our main contribution is a complete, detailed classification of these critical motion sequences (CMS). The practically important classes are identified and their degrees of ambiguity are derived. We also discuss some practical issues, especially concerning the reduction of the ambiguity of a reconstruction. 1

We address the structure-from-motion problem in the context of head modeling from video sequences for which calibration data is not available. This task is made challenging by the fact that correspondences are difficult to establish due to lack of texture and that a quasi-euclidean representation is required for realism.

for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. ii This dissertation is the result of my own work and includes nothing which is the outcome of work done in collaboration. This dissertation is not substantially the same as any I have submitted for a degree or diploma or other qualification at any other University. I further state that no part of my dissertation/thesis has already been, or is being concurrently submitted for any such degree, diploma or other quali-fication. This dissertation contains 78 figures and approximately 46000 words. This dissertation was revised December 2001. This thesis investigates the problem of reconstructing three-dimensional objects from image sequences. There are two major contributions in this thesis. The first contribution is an extension to the Space Carving framework that elimi-

We have assembled astandH-460 movable system that can capture long sequences ofomnid ectional images (up to 1,500 images at 6.7 Hzand a resolution of 1140 1030). The goal of this system is to reconstruct complex large environments, such as an entire floor of a buildH-4 from the captured images only. In this paper, wead ess the important issue of how to calibrate such a system. Our method uses images of the environment to calibrate the camera, without the use of a y specia ca93fl68900 pa93fl6 knowledge ofca08G motion, or knowledge of scene geometry. It uses the consistency of pairwise tracked point features across a sequence based on the characteristics of catad4H-35 imaging. We also show how the projection equation for this catad0H-30 camera can be formulated to be equivalent to that of a typical rectilinear perspective camera with just a simple transformation. 1 Introduction The visua63fl07'9 as modeling ofla00 environments is increa06DG' becominga aoming32 e proposition, due tof...

Modelling of 3D objects from image sequences is a challenging problem and has been an important research topic in the areas of photogrammetry and computer vision for many years. In this paper, a system is presented which automatically extracts a textured 3D surface model from a sequence of images of a scene. The system can deal with unknown camerasettings. In addition, the parameters of this camera are allowed to change during acquisition (e.g. by zooming or focussing). No prior knowledge about the scene is necessary to build the 3D models. Therefore, this system offers a high degree of flexibility. The system is based on state-of-the-art algorithms recently developed in computer vision. The 3D modelling task is decomposed into a number of succesive steps. Gradually, more knowledge of the scene and the camera setup is retrieved. At this point, the obtained accuracy is not yet at the level required for most metrology applications, but the visual quality is very convincing. This system has been applied to a number of applications in archaeology. The Roman site of Sagalassos (south-west Turkey) was used as a test case to illustrate the potential of this new approach. Key words: 3D reconstruction; self-calibration; image matching; virtual reality; uncalibrated camera; image sequences; archaeology # Corresponding author. Tel.: +32-16-321064; Fax: +32-16-321723; E-mail: Marc.Pollefeys@esat.kuleuven.ac.be (M. Pollefeys). 1 1.

Abstract—This paper proposes a quasi-dense approach to 3D surface model acquisition from uncalibrated images. First, correspondence information and geometry are computed based on new quasi-dense point features that are resampled subpixel points from a disparity map. The quasi-dense approach gives more robust and accurate geometry estimations than the standard sparse approach. The robustness is measured as the success rate of full automatic geometry estimation with all involved parameters fixed. The accuracy is measured by a fast gauge-free uncertainty estimation algorithm. The quasi-dense approach also works for more largely separated images than the sparse approach, therefore, it requires fewer images for modeling. More importantly, the quasidense approach delivers a high density of reconstructed 3D points on which a surface representation can be reconstructed. This fills the gap of insufficiency of the sparse approach for surface reconstruction, essential for modeling and visualization applications. Second, surface reconstruction methods from the given quasi-dense geometry are also developed. The algorithm optimizes new unified functionals integrating both 3D quasi-dense points and 2D image information, including silhouettes. Combining both 3D data and 2D images is more robust than the existing methods using only 2D information or only 3D data. An efficient bounded regularization method is proposed to implement the surface evolution by level-set methods. Its properties are discussed and proven for some cases. As a whole, a complete automatic and practical system of 3D modeling from raw images captured by hand-held cameras to surface representation is proposed. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superior performance of the quasi-dense approach with respect to the standard sparse approach in robustness, accuracy, and applicability. Index Terms—Three-dimensional reconstruction, surface reconstruction, structure from motion, 3D modeling, matching, uncertainty, variational calculus, level-set method. æ 1

We present a simple approach to combining scene and auto-calibration constraints for the calibration of cameras from single views and stereo pairs. Calibration constraints are provided by imaged scene structure, such as vanishing points of orthogonal directions, or rectified planes. In addition, constraints are available from the nature of the cameras and the motion between views. We formulate these constraints in terms of the geometry of the imaged absolute conic and its relationship to pole-polar pairs and the imaged circular points of planes. Three significant advantages result: first, constraints from scene features, camera characteristics and auto-calibration constraints provide linear equations in the elements of the image of the absolute conic. This means that constraints may easily be combined, and their solution is straightforward. Second, the degeneracies that occur when constraints are not independent may be easily identified. Lastly, the constraints from scene planes and i...