Online indexing structure for big image data used for 3D reconstruction

Abstract

One of the main characteristics of Internet era is the free and online availability of extremely large collections of images. Although the proliferation of millions of shared photos provide a unique opportunity for cultural heritage e-documentation, the main difficulty is that Internet image datasets are unstructured. For this reason, this paper aims to describe a new image indexing scheme with application in 3D reconstruction. The presented approach is capable, on the one hand to index images in a fast and accurate way and on the other to select form an image dataset the most appropriate images for 3D reconstruction, improving this way reconstruction computational time, while simultaneously keeping the same reconstruction performance.