A New GPU Bundle Adjustment Method for Large-Scale Data

We developed a fast and effective bundle adjustment method for large-scale datasets. The preconditioned conjugate gradient (PCG) algorithm and GPU parallel computing technology are simultaneously applied to deal with large-scale data and to accelerate the bundle adjustment process. The whole bundle adjustment process is modified to enable parallel computing. The critical optimization on parallel task assignment and GPU memory usage are specified. The proposed method was tested using 10 datasets. The traditional Leven-berg Marquardt (LM) method, advanced PCG method(8), Wu's method(16) and the proposed GPU parallel computing method are all compared and analyzed. Preliminary results have shown that the proposed method can process a large-scale dataset with about 13,000 images in less than three minutes on a common computer with GPU device. The efficiency of the proposed method is about the same with Wu's method while the accuracy is better.