MP-SfM: Monocular Surface Priors for Robust Structure-from-Motion

While Structure-from-Motion (SfM) has seen much progress over the years, state-of-the-art systems are prone to failure when facing extreme viewpoint changes in low-overlap, low-parallax or high-symmetry scenarios. Because capturing images that avoid these pitfalls is challenging, this severely limits the wider use of SfM, especially by non-expert users. We overcome these limitations by augmenting the classical SfM paradigm with monocular depth and normal priors inferred by deep neural networks. Thanks to a tight integration of monocular and multi-view constraints, our approach significantly outperforms existing ones under extreme viewpoint changes, while maintaining strong performance in standard conditions. We also show that monocular priors can help reject faulty associations due to symmetries, which is a long-standing problem for SfM. This makes our approach the first capable of reliably reconstructing challenging indoor environments from few images. Through principled uncertainty propagation, it is robust to errors in the priors, can handle priors inferred by different models with little tuning, and will thus easily benefit from future progress in monocular depth and normal estimation. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/cvg/mpsfm.