Performance Characterization of Absolute Scale Computation for 3D Structure from Motion Reconstruction

Structure from Motion (SfM) 3D reconstruction of objects and environments has become a go-to process, when detailed digitization and visualization is needed in the energy and production industry, medicine, culture and media. A successful reconstruction must properly capture the 3D information and it must scale everything to the correct scale. SfM has an inherent ambivalence to the scale of the scanned objects, so additional data is needed. In this paper we propose a lightweight solution for computation of absolute scale of 3D reconstructions by using only a real-time kinematic (RTK) GPS, in comparison to other custom solutions, which require multiple sensor fusion. Additionally, our solution estimates the noise sensitivity of the calculated scale, depending on the precision of the positioning sensor. We first test our solution with synthetic data to find how the results depend on changes to the capturing setup. We then test our pipeline using real world data, against the built-in solutions used in two state-of-the-art reconstruction software. We show that our solution gives better results, than both state-of-the-art solutions