Bedoi: benchmarks for determining overlapping images with photogrammetric information

For conventional SfM pipeline, image matching is enduring limitation when considering the time efficiency. In the last few years, to speed up image matching procedure, many image retrieval works were proposed to fast find overlapping image pairs, e.g., bag-of-word that clusters hand-crafted local features in a hierarchical way for efficient similar image retrieval, or learning-based global features (such as, VGG or ResNet) are used to represent image in a global compact manner. However, there are rarely benchmarks with referenced overlapping information to: first, evaluate the retrieval performance; second, fine tune deep-learning models along the direction that is more capable to deal with overlapping image pairs. In this work, based on traditional photogrammetric procedures, relevant photogrammetric information is obtained including image orientation parameters, 3D mesh model and etc., we then generate a benchmark for determining Overlapping Images - BeDOI, in which referenced pairwise overlapping relationships are estimated via rigorous photogrammetric geometry. To extend the generality, in total, BeDOI contains 13667 images which are basically UAV and close-range images of various scene categories, e.g., urban cities, campus, village, historical relics, green land, buildings and etc. Lastly, to demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed BeDOI, several image retrieval methods are tested and the experimental results are reported as a competition challenge.