Building Rome on a Cloudless Day

Jan-Michael Frahm, Pierre Fite Georgel, David Gallup, Tim Johnson, Rahul Raguram, Changchang Wu, Yi-Hung Jen, Enrique Dunn, Brian Clipp, Svetlana Lazebnik

Abstract: This paper introduces an approach for dense 3D reconstruction from unregistered Internet-scale photo collections with about 3 million images within the span of a day on a single PC (“cloudless”). Our method advances image clustering, stereo, stereo fusion and structure from motion to achieve high computational performance. We leverage geometric and appearance constraints to obtain a highly parallel implementation on modern graphics processors and multi-core architectures. This leads to two orders of magnitude higher performance on an order of magnitude larger dataset than competing state-of-the-art approaches.