On benchmarking camera calibration and multi-view stereo for high resolution imagery

In this paper we want to start the discussion on whether image based 3D modelling techniques can possibly be used to replace LIDAR systems for outdoor 3D data acquisition. Two main issues have to be addressed in this context: (i) camera calibration (internal and external) and (ii) dense multi-view stereo. To investigate both, we have acquired test data from outdoor scenes both with LIDAR and cameras. Using the LIDAR data as reference we estimated the ground-truth for several scenes. Evaluation sets are prepared to evaluate different aspects of 3D model building. These are: (i) pose estimation and multi-view stereo with known internal camera parameters; (ii) camera calibration and multi-view stereo with the raw images as the only input and (iii) multi-view stereo.