High accuracy and visibility-consistent dense multiview stereo

Since the initial comparison of Seitz et al., the accuracy of dense multiview stereovision methods has been increasing steadily. A number of limitations, however, make most of these methods not suitable to outdoor scenes taken under uncontrolled imaging conditions. The present work consists of a complete dense multiview stereo pipeline which circumvents these limitations, being able to handle large-scale scenes without sacrificing accuracy. Highly detailed reconstructions are produced within very reasonable time thanks to two key stages in our pipeline: a minimum s-t cut optimization over an adaptive domain that robustly and efficiently filters a quasidense point cloud from outliers and reconstructs an initial surface by integrating visibility constraints, followed by a mesh-based variational refinement that captures small details, smartly handling photo-consistency, regularization, and adaptive resolution. The pipeline has been tested over a wide range of scenes: from classic compact objects taken in a laboratory setting, to outdoor architectural scenes, landscapes, and cultural heritage sites. The accuracy of its reconstructions has also been measured on the dense multiview benchmark proposed by Strecha et al., showing the results to compare more than favorably with the current state-of-the-art methods.