Visibility Based Preconditioning for bundle adjustment

We present Visibility Based Preconditioning (VBP) a new technique for efficiently solving the linear least squares problems that arise in bundle adjustment (Triggs et al., 1999). Using the camera-point visibility structure of the scene, we describe the construction of two preconditioners. These preconditioners when combined with an inexact step Levenberg-Marquardt algorithm (Wright and Holt, 1985) offer state of the art performance on the BAL data set (Agarwal et al., 2010), with 3-5× reduction in execution time over currently available methods while delivering comparable or better solution quality.