Recovering Correct Reconstructions from Indistinguishable Geometry

Structure-from-motion (SFM) is widely utilized to generate 3D reconstructions from unordered photo-collections. However, in the presence of non unique, symmetric, or otherwise indistinguishable structure, SFM techniques often incorrectly reconstruct the final model. We propose a method that not only determines if an error is present, but automatically corrects the error in order to produce a correct representation of the scene. We find that by exploiting the co-occurrence information present in the scene's geometry, we can successfully isolate the 3D points causing the incorrect result. This allows us to split an incorrect reconstruction into error-free sub-models that we then correctly merge back together. Our experimental results show that our technique is efficient, robust to a variety of scenes, and outperforms existing methods.