Guided Capturing of Multi-view Stereo Datasets

Abstract

We present an application for mobile devices, that allows any user, even without background in computer vision, to capture a complete set of images, that is suitable for a multi-view stereo reconstruction. Compared to related tasks, such as panorama capture, this setting is much harder, as the camera needs to move unrestricted in 3D space. Our system uses structure from motion to register captured images and generates a sparse reconstruction of the scene. The dataset is built in an incremental procedure, where the next best view is computed with a novel view planning strategy, that aims for a good coverage of the scene. The user is then guided towards the new view, and the image is captured automatically at the right position. The next iteration starts after the reconstruction has been updated. The quality of the resulting dataset is on par with datasets captured by an expert user.