MegaSaM

Accurate, Fast and Robust Structure and Motion from Casual Dynamic Videos

Zhengqi Li1     Richard Tucker1     Forrester Cole 1     Qianqian Wang1,2     Linyi Jin1,3     Vickie Ye2     Angjoo Kanazawa2     Aleksander Holynski1,2     Noah Snavely1
1Google DeepMind      2UC Berkeley      3University of Michigan
TL;DR: MegaSaM estimates cameras and dense structure, quickly and accurately, from any static or dynamic video.

Abstract

We present a system that allows for accurate, fast, and robust estimation of camera parameters and depth maps from casual monocular videos of dynamic scenes. Most conventional structure from motion and monocular SLAM techniques assume input videos that feature predominantly static scenes with large amounts of parallax. Such methods tend to produce erroneous estimates in the absence of these conditions. Recent neural network-based approaches attempt to overcome these challenges; however, such methods are either computationally expensive or brittle when run on dynamic videos with uncontrolled camera motion or unknown field of view. We demonstrate the surprising effectiveness of a deep visual SLAM framework: with careful modifications to its training and inference schemes, this system can scale to real-world videos of complex dynamic scenes with unconstrained camera paths, including videos with little camera parallax. Extensive experiments on both synthetic and real videos demonstrate that our system is significantly more accurate and robust at camera pose and depth estimation when compared with prior and concurrent work, with faster or comparable running times.


Interactive examples

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Explainer video



Acknowledgements

Thanks to Rick Szeliski, Peter Hedman, Andrew Liu, Boyang Deng, and Lucy Chai for helpful proofreading, comments, and discussions.

BibTeX

@article{li2024_MegaSaM,
  title     = {{MegaSaM}: Accurate, Fast and Robust Structure and Motion from Casual Dynamic Videos},
  author    = {Li, Zhengqi and Tucker, Richard and Cole, Forrester and Wang, Qianqian and Jin, Linyi and Ye, Vickie and Kanazawa, Angjoo and Holynski, Aleksander and Snavely, Noah},
  journal   = {arXiv preprint},
  year      = {2024}}