Recent developments of digital cameras in terms of size of Charged Coupled Device (CCD) arrays and reduced costs are leading to their applications to traditional as well as new photogrammetric surveying and mapping functions. Digital cameras, intended to replace conventional film based mapping cameras, are becoming available along with many smaller format digital cameras capable of precise meas...

Structure from motion algorithms typically do not use external geometric constraints, e.g., the coplanarity of certain points or known orientations associated with such planes, until a final post-processing stage. In this paper, we show how such geometric constraints can be incorporated early on in the reconstruction process, thereby improving the quality of the estimates. The approaches we stu...

Image-based modeling is rapidly increasing in popularity since cameras are very affordable, widely available, and have a wide image acquisition range suitable for objects of vastly different size. In this paper we describe a novel image-based modeling system, which produces high-quality 3D content automatically from a collection of unconstrained and uncalibrated 2D images. The system estimates ...

This paper presents a novel method for multi-view sequential scene reconstruction scenarios such as in aerial video, that exploits the constraints imposed by the path of a moving camera to allow for a new way of detecting and correcting inaccuracies in the feature tracking and structure computation processes. The main contribution of this paper is to show that for short, planar segments of a co...

Much attention is paid to registration of terrestrial point clouds nowadays. Research is carried out towards improved efficiency and automation of the registration process. This paper reports a new approach for point clouds registration utilizing reflectance panoramic images. The approach follows a two-step procedure: pair-wise registration and global registrations. The pair-wise registration c...

Nowadays image-based modeling is receiving much attention and many applications require precise and photo-realistic 3D models. The camera calibration and orientation phases are key steps in the 3D modeling process. If these phases are not accurately performed, there will be some errors in the final model and for some applications low accuracy results are not accepted. The goal of this work is t...

In this work the direct self-calibration of a camera from three views of a unknown planar structure is proposed. Three views of a plane are sufficient to determine the plane structure, the view's positions and orientations and the camera's focal length. This is a non-linear optimizac tion problem that is solved using the heuristic Differential Evolution. Once an initial structure is obtained, t...

An increasing demand for an extended flexibility to model types and production volumes in the manufacture of large-size assemblies has generated a growing interest in the reduction of jig and fixtures deployment during assembly operations. A key factor enabling and sustaining this reduction is the constantly expanding availability of instruments for dimensional measurements of large-size produc...

Bundle adjustment is used in structure-from-motion pipelines as final refinement stage requiring a sufficiently good initialization to reach a useful local mininum. Starting from an arbitrary initialization almost always gets trapped in a poor minimum. In this work we aim to obtain an initialization-free approach which returns global minima from a large proportion of purely random starting poin...

We explore the advantages offered by the trifocal tensor in the pose estimation of a triplet of cameras as opposed to computing the relative poses pair by pair with the fundamental matrix. Theoretically, the trinilearities characterize uniquely three corresponding image points in a tighter way than the three epipolar equations and this translates in an increasing accuracy. However, we show that...