AUTOMATIC CAMERA ORIENTATION AND STRUCTURE RECOVERY WITH SAMANTHA

Abstract. SAMANTHA is a software capable of computing camera orientation and structure recovery from a sparse block of casual images without human intervention. It can process both calibrated images or uncalibrated, in which case an autocalibration routine is run. Pictures are organized into a hierarchical tree which has single images as leaves and partial reconstructions as internal nodes. The method proceeds bottom up until it reaches the root node, corresponding to the final result. This framework is one order of magnitude faster than sequential approaches, inherently parallel, less sensitive to the error accumulation causing drift. We have verified the quality of our reconstructions both qualitatively producing compelling point clouds and quantitatively, comparing them with laser scans serving as ground truth.