A Taxonomy of Structure from Motion Methods

TL;DR

This paper provides a comprehensive taxonomy of Structure from Motion methods, categorizing approaches based on their focus on structure, motion, or both, and discusses theoretical conditions for well-posedness and future research directions.

Contribution

It introduces a new taxonomy of SfM methods, offering a unified conceptual framework and insights into open problems and theoretical conditions for successful reconstruction.

Findings

Classifies SfM methods into three main categories

Highlights conditions for SfM problem well-posedness

Provides insights into future research directions

Abstract

Structure from Motion (SfM) refers to the problem of recovering both structure (i.e., 3D coordinates of points in the scene) and motion (i.e., camera matrices) starting from point correspondences in multiple images. It has attracted significant attention over the years, counting practical reconstruction pipelines as well as theoretical results. This paper is conceived as a conceptual review of SfM methods, which are grouped into three main categories, according to which part of the problem - between motion and structure - they focus on. The proposed taxonomy brings a new perspective on existing SfM approaches as well as insights into open problems and possible future research directions. Particular emphasis is given on identifying the theoretical conditions that make SfM well posed, which depend on the problem formulation that is being considered.