Robust and accurate multi-view reconstruction by prioritized matching

This paper proposes a prioritized matching approach for finding corresponding points in multiple calibrated images for multi-view stereo reconstruction. The approach takes a sparse set of seed matches between pairs of views as input and then propagates the seeds to neighboring regions by using a prioritized matching method which expands the most promising seeds first. The output of the method is a three-dimensional point cloud. Unlike previous correspondence growing approaches our method allows to use the best-first matching principle in the generic multi-view stereo setting with arbitrary number of input images. Our experiments show that matching the most promising seeds first provides very robust point cloud reconstructions efficiently with just a single expansion step. A comparison to the current state-of-the-art shows that our method produces reconstructions of similar quality but significantly faster.