Submap-Based Bundle Adjustment for 3D Reconstruction from RGB-D Data

Robert Maier, Jürgen Sturm, Daniel Cremers

Abstract: The key contribution of this paper is a novel submapping technique for RGB-D-based bundle adjustment. Our approach significantly speeds up 3D object reconstruction with respect to full bundle adjustment while generating visually compelling 3D models of high metric accuracy. While submapping has been explored previously for mono and stereo cameras, we are the first to transfer and adapt this concept to RGB-D sensors and to provide a detailed analysis of the resulting gain. In our approach, we partition the input data uniformly into submaps to optimize them individually by minimizing the 3D alignment error. Subsequently, we fix the interior variables and optimize only over the separator variables between the submaps. As we demonstrate in this paper, our method reduces the runtime of full bundle adjustment by 32 % on average while still being able to deal with real-world noise of cheap commodity sensors. We evaluated our method on a large number of benchmark datasets, and found that we outperform several state-of-the-art approaches both in terms of speed and accuracy. Furthermore, we present highly accurate 3D reconstructions of various objects to demonstrate the validity of our approach.