Perception

Structure from Motion

Structure from motion is the reconstruction of 3D scene geometry and camera poses from a collection of overlapping 2D images, by detecting and matching features across views, estimating relative camera geometry, triangulating points, and refining everything with bundle adjustment. Pipelines like COLMAP produce sparse point clouds and calibrated poses, often seeding dense multi-view stereo or radiance field reconstruction. Unlike SLAM, it typically runs offline over unordered image sets.

Why it matters for physical AI

Camera-only 3D reconstruction turns commodity images into maps, object models, and simulation assets — including the real-to-sim scene capture pipelines behind photorealistic robot training environments.