METAREG: Robust Camera Parameter Estimation by Leveraging Noisy Camera Extrinsics

Novel view synthesis methods, such as Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs) and 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS), rely on Structure-from-Motion (SfM) pipelines like COLMAP for camera parameter estimation. However, these pipelines are prone to errors due to factors like doppelgangers and perspective distortion. While edge devices (e.g., mobile phones) capture images with embedded GPS and IMU data, this meta-data is often noisy. We introduce MetaReg, a robust pipeline that improves camera parameter estimation by leveraging noisy GPS metadata. MetaReg enhances COLMAP with pre-and post-processing steps: the preprocessing stage estimates image overlap using metadata to reduce unnecessary image matching, while the post-processing stage aligns estimated camera coordinates with the world coordinate system using noisy GPS priors. Experiments on challenging datasets demonstrate that MetaReg significantly improves camera parameter estimation, enhancing robustness and accuracy.