Distributed sparse bundle adjustment algorithm based on three-dimensional point partition and asynchronous communication

Sparse bundle adjustment (SBA) is a key but time- and memory-consuming step in three-dimensional (3D) reconstruction. In this paper, we propose a 3D point-based distributed SBA algorithm (DSBA) to improve the speed and scalability of SBA. The algorithm uses an asynchronously distributed sparse bundle adjustment (A-DSBA) to overlap data communication with equation computation. Compared with the synchronous DSBA mechanism (SDSBA), A-DSBA reduces the running time by 46%. The experimental results on several 3D reconstruction datasets reveal that our distributed algorithm running on eight nodes is up to five times faster than that of the stand-alone parallel SBA. Furthermore, the speedup of the proposed algorithm (running on eight nodes with 48 cores) is up to 41 times that of the serial SBA (running on a single node).