Posts Tagged ‘sba’

New bundler version

May 26th, 2012

I’ve compiled a new version of Bundler with 2 interesting new options:

--parallel_epipolar
--ba sba

BTW those options should be passed as command arguments to bundler.exe directly (and not been added to the options.txt file).

The parallel_epipolar option allows to estimate the fundamental matrices (ransac + lm) in parallel. This problem is embarrassingly parallel but due to some global variables used in the callback passed to lmfit it wasn’t that easy to implement: I’ve used a functor to hide the global variables used by the callback but sadly lmfit doesn’t have a void* userData parameter (only a pointer to the callback). Thus I’ve modified lmfit and add this missing parameter that allow me to pass a pointer to my functor. Furthermore I had to compile almost everything in C++ instead of C to use my functor inside lmfit. Thus I had to fix a lot of malloc calls that weren’t compiling in C++ due to missing cast. To keep a “backward behavior compatibility” this option is disabled by default.

The ba option allows to change the bundle adjustment “engine” used. Here is the list of available “engine”:

  • sba (default)
  • none (for debug only)
  • pba_cpu_double
  • pba_cpu_float
  • pba_gpu_float

Pba stand for Parallel Bundle Adjustment: I’ve integrated mcba from Changchang Wu.

So if you have an Nvidia GPU card and installed the Cuda runtime you can add those options:

bundler.exe list_focal_absolute.txt --ba pba_gpu_float --parallel_epipolar
--options_file options.txt //on the same line

Timing on a 245 pictures dataset:

Bundler BA Time Nb pictures registered
SBA 2h18min 233
PBA CPU double 23min 230
PBA CPU float 9min 230
PBA GPU float 6min 230
none (for debug) 2min 189 (bad reconstruction)

You can download this new version of bundler: bundler-multiBA-parallelEpipolar-x64.zip
Update: the source code is available on the MCBA branch of my Bundler fork.

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