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Autonomous multi-angle capture

Is the depth a camera rig can actually measure good enough for the in-between angle?

research/capture-stereodepth

Is the depth a camera rig can actually measure good enough for the in-between angle? Block-matching stereo on rendered pairs feeds the two-view warp: mean depth error 14.9% at 3 cm baseline to 2.7% at 50 cm, coverage peaks at 91%, and the result never beats cutting to the nearest camera (22.3 vs 24.8 dB at a 15° gap; exact depth 27.3 dB).

7 tests

What it found

capture-novelview assumed independent depth noise of 2–5%. Here depth is measured instead: block-matching stereo on a rendered rectified pair, fed into the same two-view warp and scored against ray-traced truth at a 15° gap. Mean depth error falls from 14.9% at a 3 cm baseline to 2.7% at 50 cm, but coverage peaks at 91% near 20 cm (stereo cannot match occluded or flat pixels), and the synthesised view never beats cutting to the nearest camera: best 22.3 dB at 20 cm against 24.8 dB, with exact depth at 27.3 dB. Independent noise with the same mean error is optimistic by 1optimistic by 1–5 dBndash;7 dB, because real errors are correlated and missing depth leaves holes. Sensor noise of 3% already costs 3 dB. Toy scene, smooth textures, a classic matcher with no learned prior or hole filler.

A figure from its own output

Figure produced by research/capture-stereodepth: baseline
capture-stereodepth/experiments/baseline.svg, written by the project's own experiment code.

Paper, code and results

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Produced with AI assistance (Claude). Results are from the code in this repository and are simulated or stylised unless the abstract says otherwise; nothing here implies affiliation with or endorsement by any lab, researcher or company cited. MIT licensed.