Superpixel Soup: Monocular Dense 3D Reconstruction of a Complex Dynamic Scene

• Published in: IEEE transactions on pattern analysis and machine intelligence 2021-05, Vol.43 (5), p.1705-1717
• Main Authors: Kumar, Suryansh, Dai, Yuchao, Li, Hongdong
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Algorithms; as-rigid-as-possible; Cameras; Dense 3D reconstruction; Dynamics; Heuristic algorithms; Image reconstruction; Image segmentation; Motion segmentation; perspective camera; Planar structures; relative scale ambiguity; structure from motion; Surface reconstruction; Three-dimensional displays
• ISSN: 0162-8828; 1939-3539; 2160-9292
• DOI: 10.1109/TPAMI.2019.2955131

This work addresses the task of dense 3D reconstruction of a complex dynamic scene from images. The prevailing idea to solve this task is composed of a sequence of steps and is dependent on the success of several pipelines in its execution. To overcome such limitations with the existing algorithm, we propose a unified approach to solve this problem. We assume that a dynamic scene can be approximated by numerous piecewise planar surfaces, where each planar surface enjoys its own rigid motion, and the global change in the scene between two frames is as-rigid-as-possible (ARAP). Consequently, our model of a dynamic scene reduces to a soup of planar structures and rigid motion of these local planar structures. Using planar over-segmentation of the scene, we reduce this task to solving a "3D jigsaw puzzle" problem. Hence, the task boils down to correctly assemble each rigid piece to construct a 3D shape that complies with the geometry of the scene under the ARAP assumption. Further, we show that our approach provides an effective solution to the inherent scale-ambiguity in structure-from-motion under perspective projection. We provide extensive experimental results and evaluation on several benchmark datasets. Quantitative comparison with competing approaches shows state-of-the-art performance.