Multi-View Stereo: Redundancy Benefits for 3D Reconstruction

This work investigates the influence of using multiple views for 3D reconstruction with respect to depth accuracy and robustness. In particular we show that multiview matching not only contributes to scene completeness, but also improves depth accuracy by improved triangulation angles. We first start by synthetic experiments on a typical aerial photogrammetric camera network and investigate how baseline (i.e. triangulation angle) and redundancy affect the depth error. Our evaluation also includes a comparison between combined pairwise triangulated and fused stereo pairs in contrast to true multiview triangulation. By analyzing the 3D uncertainty ellipsoid of triangulated points we demonstrate the clear advantage of a multiview approach over fused two view stereo algorithms. We propose an efficient dense matching algorithm that utilizes pairwise optical flow followed by a robust correspondence chaining approach. We provide evaluation results of the proposed method on ground truth data and compare its performance in contrast to a multiview plane sweep method.