Mobile3DRecon: Real-time Monocular 3D Reconstruction on a Mobile Phone

We present a real-time monocular 3D reconstruction system on a mobile phone, called Mobile3DRecon. Using an embedded monocular camera, our system provides an online mesh generation capability on back end together with real-time 6DoF pose tracking on front end for users to achieve realistic AR effects and interactions on mobile phones. Unlike most existing state-of-the-art systems which produce only point cloud based 3D models online or surface mesh offline, we propose a novel online incremental mesh generation approach to achieve fast online dense surface mesh reconstruction to satisfy the demand of real-time AR applications. For each keyframe of 6DoF tracking, we perform a robust monocular depth estimation, with a multi-view semi-global matching method followed by a depth refinement post-processing. The proposed mesh generation module incrementally fuses each estimated keyframe depth map to an online dense surface mesh, which is useful for achieving realistic AR effects such as occlusions and collisions. We verify our real-time reconstruction results on two mid-range mobile platforms. The experiments with quantitative and qualitative evaluation demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed monocular 3D reconstruction system, which can handle the occlusions and collisions between virtual objects and real scenes to achieve realistic AR effects.