MegBA: A GPU-Based Distributed Library for Large-Scale Bundle Adjustment

Jie Ren, Wenteng Liang, Ran Yan, Luo Mai, Shiwen Liu, Xiao Liu ;

"Large-scale Bundle Adjustment (BA) requires massive memory and computation resources which are difficult to be fulfilled by existing BA libraries. In this paper, we propose MegBA, a GPU-based distributed BA library. MegBA can provide massive aggregated memory by automatically partitioning large BA problems, and assigning the solvers of sub-problems to parallel nodes. The parallel solvers adopt distributed Precondition Conjugate Gradient and distributed Schur Elimination, so that an effective solution, which can match the precision of those computed by a single node, can be efficiently computed. To accelerate BA computation, we implement end-to-end BA computation using high-performance primitives available on commodity GPUs. MegBA exposes easy-to-use APIs that are compatible with existing popular BA libraries. Experiments show that MegBA can significantly outperform state-of-the-art BA libraries: Ceres (41.45×), RootBA (64.576×) and DeepLM (6.769×) in several large-scale BA benchmarks."