Abstract

State-of-the-art Multi-View Stereo (MVS) algorithms deliver dense depth maps or complex meshes with very high detail, and redundancy over regular surfaces. In turn, our interest lies in an approximate, but light-weight method that is better to consider for large-scale applications, such as urban scene reconstruction from ground-based images. We present a novel approach for producing dense reconstructions from multiple images and from the underlying sparse Structure-from-Motion (SfM) data in an effificient way. To overcome the problem of SfM sparsity and textureless areas, we assume piecewise planarity of man-made scenes and exploit both sparse visibility and a fast over-segmentation of the images. Reconstruction is formulated as an energydriven, multi-view plane assignment problem, which we solve jointly over superpixels from all views while avoiding expensive photoconsistency computations. The resulting planar primitives – defifined by detailed superpixel boundaries – are computed in about 10 seconds per image