VidMap: Exploiting Temporal Structure for Video-Based Structure-from-Motion
Authors: Zador Pataki, Paul-Edouard Sarlin, Marc Pollefeys
Organizations: ETH Zurich · Google · Microsoft Spatial AI Lab
Abstract
Accurately recovering the camera's calibration and metric poses for any unconstrained video would unlock large-scale training data for navigation and scene understanding. The dominant approaches to this problem are severely limited: Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) is sensitive to initialization and transient failures due to its causal, incremental nature; it is often over-optimized for real-time operation and generally requires known camera calibration; while Structure-from-Motion (SfM) typically forgoes any image ordering, enabling optimal initialization and global optimization, but lacks robustness to visual symmetries and extreme motions. To bridge this gap, we introduce a system that combines the strong sequential constraints of SLAM with the flexibility and global optimization of offline SfM, enabling the metric reconstruction of arbitrary, long, uncalibrated videos. This system leverages recent advances in wide-baseline dense image matching, treats temporal ordering as a first-class citizen for reliable loop closure, and augments global optimization with metric monocular depth priors. As a result, thorough evaluations on diverse, challenging datasets that exhibit extreme motion and visual symmetries reveal that our approach is significantly more robust and accurate than both state-of-the-art SLAM and SfM, classical or learned, with given or unknown camera calibration. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/cvg/vidmap.
Global Structure-from-Motion (SfM) is an efficient paradigm for recovering camera poses and sparse 3D structure from unordered images. However, its reliance on scale-ambiguous epipolar geometry makes global positioning sensitive to noisy baseline estimates and weak view-graph constraints, while false edges from visually ambiguous pairs can further degrade reconstruction. We propose DGSfM, a depth-aware global SfM pipeline that uses monocular depth maps as a scalable prior while preserving explicit multi-view optimization. For each image pair, we use a depth-aware relative pose solver to convert scale-ambiguous epipolar constraints into scale-aware relative pose constraints. We further improve robustness through view-graph filtering and depth-consistency-based correspondence pruning, which suppress false edges and matches that remain plausible under epipolar geometry alone. Finally, global scale averaging and depth-guided pose-point initialization align monocular depth maps into a common reconstruction scale and provide stable initialization for global positioning and bundle adjustment. Experiments on ETH3D and IMC2021 show that DGSfM consistently improves over strong global SfM baselines across sparse and dense matching front-ends, achieving substantial gains in pose accuracy. Code is available at https://github.com/sithu31296/DGSfM.
Camera pose estimation is a key step in 3D reconstruction and view-synthesis pipelines. We present a deep, global Structure-from-Motion framework based on learned view-graph aggregation. Our method employs a permutation-equivariant, edge-conditioned graph neural network that takes noisy pairwise relative poses as input and outputs globally consistent camera extrinsics. The network is trained without ground-truth supervision, relying solely on a relative-pose consistency objective. This is followed by 3D point triangulation and robust bundle adjustment. Our approach is efficient, scalable to more than a thousand images, and robust to graph density. We evaluate our method on MegaDepth, 1DSfM, Strecha, and BlendedMVS. These experiments demonstrate that our method achieves superior rotation and translation accuracy compared to deep track-centric methods while registering more images across many scenes, and competitive results compared to state-of-the-art classical pipelines, while being much faster.
Structure-from-Motion (SfM) is a fundamental tool for sparse 3D reconstruction with broad impact in robotics and vision, supporting mapping, localization, and large-scale scene modeling. However, conventional pipelines often fail under hard visual ambiguity caused by repeated or symmetric structures, and incur heavy computational cost due to redundant cameras and constraints. We present HiSfM, a hierarchical coarse-to-fine SfM framework that improves robustness and efficiency through scaffold construction. HiSfM first forms strong local communities using geometrical induced heuristics, then connects communities with a compact yet strong skeleton by packing edge-disjoint spanning trees (EDST) while verifying skeletal edges with a two-view disambiguator. We reconstruct a stable scaffold on this verified skeleton, serving as an anchor to capture the essence of the scene, and subsequently absorb remaining images via efficient registration and triangulation for further refinements. Experiments on ambiguity-focused benchmarks and general datasets show that HiSfM prevents ambiguity-induced failures while substantially reducing runtime compared to previous methods, and improves completeness over aggressive sparsification methods. Code is available at https://github.com/3dv-casia/HiSfM.