Photogrammetric 3d reconstruction in matlab: Development of a free tool

This paper presents the current state of development of a free Matlab tool for photogrammetric reconstruction developed at the University of Padova, Italy. The goal of this software is mostly educational, i.e. allowing students to have a close look to the specific steps which lead to the computation of a dense point cloud. As most of recently developed photogrammetric softwares, it is based on a Structure from Motion approach. Despite being mainly motivated by educational purposes, certain implementation details are clearly inspired by recent research works, e.g. limiting the computational burden of the feature matching by determining a suboptimal set of features to be considered, using information provided by external sensors to ease the matching process.