A Fast and Robust Framework for Semiautomatic and Automatic Registration of Photographs to 3D Geometry

We present a simple, fast, and robust complete framework for 2D/3D registration capable to align in a semiautomatic or completely automatic manner a large set of unordered images to a massive point cloud. Our method converts the hard to solve image-to-geometry registration task in a Structure-from-Motion (SfM) plus a 3D/3D alignment problem. We exploit a SfM framework that, starting just from an unordered image collection, computes an estimate of the camera parameters and a sparse 3D geometry deriving from matched image features. We then coarsely register this model to the given 3D geometry by estimating a global scale and absolute orientation using two solutions: a minimal user intervention or a stochastic global point set registration approach. A specialized sparse bundle adjustment (SBA) step, that exploits the correspondence between the sparse geometry and the fine input 3D model, is then used to refine intrinsic and extrinsic parameters of each camera. Output data is suitable for photo blending frameworks to produce seamless colored models. The effectiveness of the method is demonstrated on a series of synthetic and real-world 2D/3D Cultural Heritage datasets.