Color correction for image-based modeling in the large

Current texture creation methods for image-based modeling suffer from color discontinuity issues due to drastically varying conditions of illumination, exposure and time during the image capturing process. This paper proposes a novel system that generates consistent textures for triangular meshes. The key to our system is a color correction framework for large-scale unordered image collections. We model the problem as a graph-structured optimization over the overlapping regions of image pairs. After reconstructing the mesh of the scene, we accurately calculate matched image regions by re-projecting images onto the mesh. Then the image collection is robustly adjusted using a non-linear least square solver over color histograms in an unsupervised fashion. Finally, a connectivity-preserving edge pruning method is introduced to accelerate the color correction process. This system is evaluated with crowdsourcing image collections containing medium-sized scenes and city-scale urban datasets. To the best of our knowledge, this system is the first consistent texturing system for image-based modeling that is capable of handling thousands of input images.