IVS3D: An Open Source Framework for Intelligent Video Sampling and Preprocessing to Facilitate 3D Reconstruction

The creation of detailed 3D models is relevant for a wide range of applications such as navigation in three-dimensional space, construction planning or disaster assessment. However, the complex processing and long execution time for detailed 3D reconstructions require the original database to be reduced in order to obtain a result in reasonable time. In this paper we therefore present our framework iVS3D for intelligent pre-processing of image sequences. Our software is able to down sample entire videos to a specific frame rate, as well as to resize and crop the individual images. Furthermore, thanks to our modular architecture, it is easy to develop and integrate plugins with additional algorithms. We provide three plugins as baseline methods that enable an intelligent selection of suitable images and can enrich them with additional information. To filter out images affected by motion blur, we developed a plugin that detects these frames and also searches the spatial neighbourhood for suitable images as replacements. The second plugin uses optical flow to detect redundant images caused by a temporarily stationary camera. In our experiments, we show how this approach leads to a more balanced image sampling if the camera speed varies, and that excluding such redundant images leads to a time saving of 8.1% for our sequences. A third plugin makes it possible to exclude challenging image regions from the 3D reconstruction by performing semantic segmentation. As we think that the community can greatly benefit from such an approach, we will publish our framework and the developed plugins open source using the MIT licence to allow co-development and easy extension.