Resolving Scale Ambiguity in Multi-view 3D Reconstruction using Dual-Pixel Sensors

Kohei Ashida*, Hiroaki Santo, Fumio Okura, Yasuyuki Matsushita ;

"Multi-view 3D reconstruction, namely structure-from-motion and multi-view stereo, is an essential component in 3D computer vision. In general, multi-view 3D reconstruction suffers from unknown scale ambiguity unless a reference object of known size is recorded together with the scene, or the camera poses are pre-calibrated. In this paper, we show that multi-view images recorded by a dual-pixel (DP) sensor allow us to automatically resolve the scale ambiguity without requiring a reference object or pre-calibration. Specifically, the observed defocus blurs in DP images provide sufficient information for determining the scale when paired together with the depth maps (up to scale) recovered from the multi-view 3D reconstruction. Based on this observation, we develop a simple yet effective linear solution method to determine the absolute scale in multi-view 3D reconstruction. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method with diverse scenes recorded with different cameras/lenses. Code and data are available at https://github.com/kohei-ashida/dp-sfm."