sba 1.6.5.1

wrapper for Lourakis' sparse bundle adjustment C library

Enjoy! The most recent version can be obtained from bitbucket via:

hg clone ssh://[e-mail]/devangel77b/python-sba

As prerequisites, you will also need to install the sba library as a shared object (libsba.so) (Makefile with shared object target included here) and the sba projections library (libsbaprojs.so):

http://www.ics.forth.gr/~lourakis/sba
https://bitbucket.org/devangel77b/libsbaprojs

See HOWTO.txt for details.

Typical usage

The main way to use this is as follows:

import sba

cameras = sba.Cameras.fromTxt('cams.txt')
points = sba.Points.fromTxt('pts.txt',cameras.ncameras)
newcams, newpts, info = sba.SparseBundleAdjust(cameras,points)

If you wish to alter the default and autodetected options, you can create an Options object and change it, and then pass it to sba:

options = sba.Options.fromInputs(points,cameras)
# can also update options.XXX to appropriate values
newcams,newpts,info = sba.SparseBundleAdjust(cameras,points,options)

Hopefully this is cleaner than the original way to call it in C.

Helpful Hints

Some users have used this package in a workflow combined with the CalTech Borguet camera calibrations and with data exported from Hedrick’s Matlab dltDV5 / easyWand5 tools. If decomposing someone else’s P matrix for use as a cams.txt, it may help to remember that rotations and translations here are in the world frame; Rc=R’, Tc-R*t (using notation of Hartley and Zisserman).

When building for a Mac, one user (amin_abouee) noted that the extensions should be .dylib rather that .so; this can be fixed by altering the lines in both the Makefiles and the code, e.g.:

libsba = ctypes.CDLL(“libsba.dylib”)

Contributors

The original sba C library was written by Manolis Lourakis and is described in Lourakis, Manolis I A and Antonis A Argyros (2004), “The design and implementation of a generic sparse bundle adjustment software package based on the Levenberg-Marquardt algorithm”, FOURTH_ICS TR-340.

If using this package in research work, we would appreciate you citing it: D Theriault, N Fuller, B Jackson, E Bluhm, D Evangelista, Z Wu, M Betke, and T Hedrick (2014). A protocol and calibration method for accurate multi-camera field videography. J exp Biol 217:1843-1848. The BibTeX entry is:

@article{Theriault:2014,
  author = {Theriault, D and Fuller, N and Jackson, B and Bluhm, E and Evangelista, D and Wu, Z and Betke, M and Hedrick, T},
  title = {A protocol and calibration method for accurate multi-camera field videography},
  journal = {J exp Biol},
  doi={10.1242/jeb.100529},
  year = {2014},
  volume = {217},
  pages = {1843--1848}
}

Thanks also to

Manolis Lourakis and Antonis Argyros, Ty Hedrick, Evan Bluhm, my mom and the academy. Version 1.6.5 has bug fixes from Isaac Yeaton and Nick Gravish, and notes on Mac usage from Amin Abouee.