Abstract for vogiatzis_bmvc03

Proc. British Machine Vision Conference

BAYESIAN STOCHASTIC MESH OPTIMISATION FOR 3D RECONSTRUCTION

George Vogiatzis, Philip Torr and Roberto Cipolla

September 2003

We describe a mesh based approach to the problem of structure from motion. The input to the algorithm is a small set of images, sparse noisy feature correspondences (such as those provided by a Harris corner detector and cross correlation) and the camera geometry plus calibration. The output is a 3D mesh, that when projected onto each view, is visually consistent with the images. There are two contributions in this paper. The first is a Bayesian formulation in which simplicity and smoothness assumptions are encoded in the prior distribution. The resulting posterior is optimized by simulated annealing. The second and more important contribution is a way to make this optimization scheme more efficient. Generic simulated annealing has been long studied in computer vision and is thought to be highly inefficient. This is often because the proposal distribution searches regions of space which are far from the modes. In order to improve the performance of simulated annealing it has long been acknowledged that choice of the correct proposal distribution is of paramount importance to convergence. Taking inspiration from RANSAC and importance sampling we craft a proposal distribution that is tailored to the problem of structure from motion. This makes our approach particularly robust to noise and ambiguity. We show results for an artificial object and an architectural scene.


(ftp:) vogiatzis_bmvc03.pdf (http:) vogiatzis_bmvc03.pdf

If you have difficulty viewing files that end '.gz', which are gzip compressed, then you may be able to find tools to uncompress them at the gzip web site.

If you have difficulty viewing files that are in PostScript, (ending '.ps' or '.ps.gz'), then you may be able to find tools to view them at the gsview web site.

We have attempted to provide automatically generated PDF copies of documents for which only PostScript versions have previously been available. These are clearly marked in the database - due to the nature of the automatic conversion process, they are likely to be badly aliased when viewed at default resolution on screen by acroread.