Incremental fusion of Structure-from-Motion and GPS using constrained bundle adjustments

Two problems occur when bundle adjustment (BA) is applied on long image sequences: large calculation time and drift (or error accumulation). In recent work, the calculation time is reduced by local BAs applied in an incremental scheme. The drift may be reduced by fusion of GPS and Structure-from-Motion. An existing fusion method is BA minimizing a weighted sum of image and GPS errors. This paper introduces two constrained BAs for fusion which enforce an upper bound for the reprojection error. These BAs are alternatives to the existing fusion BA which does not guarantee a small reprojection error and requires a weight as input. Then, the three fusion BAs are integrated in an incremental Structure-from-Motion method based on local BA. Last, we will compare the fusion results on long monocular image sequences and low cost GPS.