Cluster-based 3D reconstruction of aerial video

Large-scale 3D scene reconstruction using Structure from Motion (SfM) continues to be very computationally challenging despite much active research in the area. We propose an efficient, scalable processing chain designed for cluster computing and suitable for use on aerial video. The sparse bundle adjustment step, which is iterative and difficult to parallelize, is accomplished by partitioning the input image set, generating independent point clouds in parallel, and then fusing the clouds and combining duplicate points. We compare this processing chain to a leading parallel SfM implementation, which exploits fine-grained parallelism in various matrix operations and is not designed to scale beyond a multi-core workstation with GPU. We show our cluster-based approach offers significant improvement in scalability and runtime while producing comparable point cloud density and more accurate point location estimates.