Interactive Environment for Testing SfM Image Capture Configurations

In recent years 3D reconstruction has become an important part of the manufacturing industry, product design, digital cultural heritage preservation, etc. Structure from Motion (SfM) is widely adopted, since it does not require specialized hardware and easily scales with the size of the scanned object. However, one of the drawbacks of SfM is the initial time and resource investment required for setting up a proper scanning environment and equipment, such as proper lighting and camera, number of images, the need of green screen, etc, as well as to determine if an object can be scanned successfully. This is why we propose a simple solution for approximating the whole capturing process. This way users can test fast and effortlessly different capturing setups. We introduce a visual indicator on how much of the scanned object is captured with each image in our environment, giving users a better idea of how many images would be needed. We compare the 3D reconstruction created from images from our solution, with ones created from rendered images using Autodesk Maya and V-Ray. We demonstrate that we provide comparable reconstruction accuracy at a fraction of the time