A Cluster-Based 3D Reconstruction System for Large-Scale Scenes

Abstract

The reconstruction of realistic large-scale 3D scene models using aerial images or videos has significant applications in smart cities, surveying and mapping, the military and other fields. In the current state-of-the-art 3D-reconstruction pipeline, the massive scale of the scene and the enormous amount of input data are still considerable obstacles to the rapid reconstruction of large-scale 3D scene models. In this paper, we develop a professional system for large-scale 3D reconstruction. First, in the sparse point-cloud reconstruction stage, the computed matching relationships are used as the initial camera graph and divided into multiple subgraphs by a clustering algorithm. Multiple computational nodes execute the local structure-from-motion (SFM) technique, and local cameras are registered. Global camera alignment is achieved by integrating and optimizing all local camera poses. Second, in the dense point-cloud reconstruction stage, the adjacency information is decoupled from the pixel level by red-and-black checkerboard grid sampling. The optimal depth value is obtained using normalized cross-correlation (NCC). Additionally, during the mesh-reconstruction stage, feature-preserving mesh simplification, Laplace mesh-smoothing and mesh-detail-recovery methods are used to improve the quality of the mesh model. Finally, the above algorithms are integrated into our large-scale 3D-reconstruction system. Experiments show that the system can effectively improve the reconstruction speed of large-scale 3D scenes.