Accurate 3D Reconstruction from Small Motion Clip for Rolling Shutter Cameras

Structure from small motion has become an important topic in 3D computer vision as a method for estimating depth, since capturing the input is so user-friendly. However, major limitations exist with respect to the form of depth uncertainty, due to the narrow baseline and the rolling shutter effect. In this paper, we present a dense 3D reconstruction method from small motion clips using commercial hand-held cameras, which typically cause the undesired rolling shutter artifact. To address these problems, we introduce a novel small motion bundle adjustment that effectively compensates for the rolling shutter effect. Moreover, we propose a pipeline for a fine-scale dense 3D reconstruction that models the rolling shutter effect by utilizing both sparse 3D points and the camera trajectory from narrow-baseline images. In this reconstruction, the sparse 3D points are propagated to obtain an initial depth hypothesis using a geometry guidance term. Then, the depth information on each pixel is obtained by sweeping the plane around each depth search space near the hypothesis. The proposed framework shows accurate dense reconstruction results suitable for various sought-after applications. Both qualitative and quantitative evaluations show that our method consistently generates better depth maps compared to state-of-the-art methods.