bundle adjustment

Adjusting every camera pose and every 3D point together so predicted and observed pixels agree as closely as possible.

Bundle adjustment treats every camera pose and every triangulated 3D point in a reconstruction as simultaneously adjustable unknowns, and refines all of them together to minimize the total reprojection error summed over every observation. Because every camera and point are adjusted against every observation at once, it corrects errors that a chain of pairwise pose estimates can only ever accumulate.

Examples

A reconstruction chained pairwise across 80 frames averages 8.3 pixels of reprojection error; running bundle adjustment over all 80 poses and every 3D point together drops that average to 0.6 pixels.