Samantha: Towards automatic image-based model acquisition

In this paper we describe SAMANTHA, a Structure and Motion pipeline from images which is both more robust and computationally cheaper than current competing approaches. Pictures are organized into a hierarchical tree which has single images as leaves and partial reconstructions as internal nodes. The method proceeds bottom up until it reaches the root node, corresponding to the final result. This framework is one order of magnitude faster than sequential approaches, inherently parallel, less sensitive to the error accumulation causing drift and truly uncalibrated, not needing EXIF metadata to be present in pictures. We have verified the quality of our reconstructions both qualitatively producing compelling point clouds and quantitatively, comparing them with laser scans serving as ground truth. We also show how to automatically extract a meaningful collection of planar patches obtaining a compact, stable representation of scenes.