Rapid scene reconstruction on mobile phones from panoramic images

Rapid 3D reconstruction of environments has become an active research topic due to the importance of 3D models in a huge number of applications, be it in Augmented Reality (AR), architecture or other commercial areas. In this paper we present a novel system that allows for the generation of a coarse 3D model of the environment within several seconds on mobile smartphones. By using a very fast and flexible algorithm a set of panoramic images is captured to form the basis of wide field-of-view images required for reliable and robust reconstruction. A cheap on-line space carving approach based on Delaunay triangulation is employed to obtain dense, polygonal, textured representations. The use of an intuitive method to capture these images, as well as the efficiency of the reconstruction approach allows for an application on recent mobile phone hardware, giving visually pleasing results almost instantly.