A low-overhead asynchronous consensus framework for distributed bundle adjustment

Generally, the distributed bundle adjustment (DBA) method uses multiple worker nodes to solve the bundle adjustment problems and overcomes the computation and memory storage limitations of a single computer. However, the performance considerably degrades owing to the overhead introduced by the additional block partitioning step and synchronous waiting. Therefore, we propose a low-overhead consensus framework. A partial barrier based asynchronous method is proposed to early achieve consensus with respect to the faster worker nodes to avoid waiting for the slower ones. A scene summarization procedure is designed and integrated into the block partitioning step to ensure that clustering can be performed on the small summarized scene. Experiments conducted on public datasets show that our method can improve the worker node utilization rate and reduce the block partitioning time. Also, sample applications are demonstrated using our large-scale culture heritage datasets.