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A survey of structure from motion*.

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 May 2017

Onur Özyeşil ,
Vladislav Voroninski ,
Ronen Basri  and
Amit Singer
Onur Özyeşil
Affiliation:
INTECH Investment Management LLC, One Palmer Square, Suite 441, Princeton, NJ 08542, USA E-mail: [email protected]
Vladislav Voroninski
Affiliation:
Helm.ai, Menlo Park, CA 94025, USA E-mail: [email protected]
Ronen Basri
Affiliation:
Department of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics, Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, 76100, Israel E-mail: [email protected]
Amit Singer
Affiliation:
Department of Mathematics and PACM, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544-1000, USA E-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

The structure from motion (SfM) problem in computer vision is to recover the three-dimensional (3D) structure of a stationary scene from a set of projective measurements, represented as a collection of two-dimensional (2D) images, via estimation of motion of the cameras corresponding to these images. In essence, SfM involves the three main stages of (i) extracting features in images (e.g. points of interest, lines, etc.) and matching these features between images, (ii) camera motion estimation (e.g. using relative pairwise camera positions estimated from the extracted features), and (iii) recovery of the 3D structure using the estimated motion and features (e.g. by minimizing the so-called reprojection error). This survey mainly focuses on relatively recent developments in the literature pertaining to stages (ii) and (iii). More specifically, after touching upon the early factorization-based techniques for motion and structure estimation, we provide a detailed account of some of the recent camera location estimation methods in the literature, followed by discussion of notable techniques for 3D structure recovery. We also cover the basics of the simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) problem, which can be viewed as a specific case of the SfM problem. Further, our survey includes a review of the fundamentals of feature extraction and matching (i.e. stage (i) above), various recent methods for handling ambiguities in 3D scenes, SfM techniques involving relatively uncommon camera models and image features, and popular sources of data and SfM software.

Type
Research Article
Information
Acta Numerica , Volume 26 , 01 May 2017 , pp. 305 - 364
Copyright
© Cambridge University Press, 2017 

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