Sparse Second-Order Cone Programming for 3D Reconstruction

This paper presents how to minimize the second-order cone programming problem occurring in the 3D reconstruction of multiple views. The $L_{\infty}$-norm minimization is done by a series of the minimization of the maximum infeasibility. Since the problem has many inequality constraints, we have to adopt methods of the interior point algorithm, in which the inequalities are sequentially approximated by log-barrier functions. An initial feasible solution is found easily by the construction of the problem. Actual computing is done by an iterative Newton-style update. When we apply the interior point method to the problem of reconstructing the structure and motion, every Newton update requires to solve a very large system of linear equations. We show that the sparse bundle-adjustment technique can be utilized in the same way during the Newton update, and therefore we obtain a very efficient computation.