Bundle adjustment – a modern synthesis

Abstract

This paper is a survey of the theory and methods of photogrammetric bundle adjustment, aimed at potential implementors in the computer vision community. Bundle adjustment is the problem of refining a visual reconstruction to produce jointly optimal structure and viewing parameter estimates. Topics covered include: the choice of cost function and robustness; numerical optimization including sparse Newton methods, linearly convergent approximations, updating and recursive methods; gauge (datum) invariance; and quality control. The theory is developed for general robust cost functions rather than restricting attention to traditional nonlinear least squares.