A fast 3D scene reconstructing method using continuous video

Accurate 3D measuring systems thrive in the past few years. Most of them are based on laser scanners because these laser scanners are able to acquire 3D information directly and precisely in real time. However, comparing to the conventional cameras, these kinds of equipment are usually expensive and they are not commonly available to customers. Moreover, laser scanners interfere easily with each other sensors of the same type. On the other hand, computer vision-based 3D measuring techniques use stereo matching to acquire the cameras’ relative position and then estimate the 3D location of points on the image. Because this kind of systems needs additional estimation of the 3D information, systems with real time capability often relies on heavy parallelism that prevents implementation on mobile devices. Inspired by the structure from motion systems, we propose a system that reconstructs sparse feature points to a 3D point cloud using a mono video sequence so as to achieve higher computation efficiency. The system keeps tracking all detected feature points and calculates both the amount of these feature points and their moving distances. We only use the key frames to estimate the current position of the camera in order to reduce the computation load and the noise interference on the system. Furthermore, for the sake of avoiding duplicate 3D points, the system reconstructs the 2D point only when the point shifts out of the boundary of a camera. In our experiments, we show that our system is able to be implemented on tablets and can achieve state-of-the-art accuracy with a denser point cloud with high speed.