Multi-View Triangulation: Systematic Comparison and an Improved Method

Triangulation is an important task in the 3D reconstruction of computer vision. It seems simple to find the position of a point in 3D space when its 2D perspective projections in multi-view images are given and the corresponding camera projection matrices are known. However, in practice, multiple lines in 3D space do not intersect at one point because of noise. Then how to calculate the optimal 3D point of intersection becomes difficult. While there have been multiple methods trying to solve this problem, there is no systematic comparison between them. In this paper, we reviewed various currently existing variants of triangulation method and compared them through extensive experiments. The speed and accuracy of these methods have been compared using both synthetic and real datasets. We presented the results of experiments and summarized the advantages, limitations, and applicability of these methods so that to provide a guide for users when they need to choose an appropriate triangulation method for their given applications. Moreover, based on above analysis we proposed an improved method which shows better performance.