Mobile phone and cloud — A dream team for 3D reconstruction

Recently, Structure-from-Motion pipelines (SfM) for the 3D reconstruction of scenes from images were pushed from desktop computers onto mobile devices, like phones or tablets. However, mobile devices offer much more than just necessary computational power. A combination of handheld device with camera, display and full connectivity entails possibilities for an on-line 3D reconstruction that would have been difficult to implement otherwise. In this work, we propose a combination of a regular mobile phone as frontend with a centralized server plus annex cloud as backend for collaborative, on-line 3D reconstruction. We illustrate few advantages of this combination of a myriad of new possibilities: First, we automatically balance computational load between the frontend and the backend depending on battery autonomy and available bandwidth. Second, we select the best of algorithms given the available resources to obtain better 3D models. Finally, we allow for collaborative modeling in order to arrive at more complete and more detailed models, especially when the objects or scenes are big. This paper presents an implementation of such a joint mobile-cloud modeling approach and demonstrates its advantages via real-life reconstructions.