Robust and Efficient CPU-Based RGB-D Scene Reconstruction

Sensors (Basel). 2018 Oct 28;18(11):3652. doi: 10.3390/s18113652.

Abstract

3D scene reconstruction is an important topic in computer vision. A complete scene is reconstructed from views acquired along the camera trajectory, each view containing a small part of the scene. Tracking in textureless scenes is well known to be a Gordian knot of camera tracking, and how to obtain accurate 3D models quickly is a major challenge for existing systems. For the application of robotics, we propose a robust CPU-based approach to reconstruct indoor scenes efficiently with a consumer RGB-D camera. The proposed approach bridges feature-based camera tracking and volumetric-based data integration together and has a good reconstruction performance in terms of both robustness and efficiency. The key points in our approach include: (i) a robust and fast camera tracking method combining points and edges, which improves tracking stability in textureless scenes; (ii) an efficient data fusion strategy to select camera views and integrate RGB-D images on multiple scales, which enhances the efficiency of volumetric integration; (iii) a novel RGB-D scene reconstruction system, which can be quickly implemented on a standard CPU. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach reconstructs scenes with higher robustness and efficiency compared to state-of-the-art reconstruction systems.

Keywords: 3D reconstruction; camera tracking; simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM); volumetric integration.