# ColabSfM: Collaborative Structure-from-Motion by Point Cloud Registration

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.17093 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.17093/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 41 of its 69 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 21 Mar 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 41)

- [Layer Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.06450/) (2016)
- [Gaussian Error Linear Units (GELUs)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.08415/) (2016)
- [SuperGlue: Learning Feature Matching with Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.11763/) (2019)
- [MegaDepth: Learning Single-View Depth Prediction from Internet Photos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.00607/) (2018)
- [Open3D: A Modern Library for 3D Data Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.09847/) (2018)
- [LightGlue: Local Feature Matching at Light Speed](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.13643/) (2023)
- [From Coarse to Fine: Robust Hierarchical Localization at Large Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.03506/) (2018)
- [Circle Loss: A Unified Perspective of Pair Similarity Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.10857/) (2020)
- [Mega-NeRF: Scalable Construction of Large-Scale NeRFs for Virtual Fly-Throughs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10703/) (2021)
- [3DMatch: Learning Local Geometric Descriptors from RGB-D Reconstructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.08182/) (2016)
- [Deep Closest Point: Learning Representations for Point Cloud Registration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.03304/) (2019)
- [DISK: Learning local features with policy gradient](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.13566/) (2020)
- [PREDATOR: Registration of 3D Point Clouds with Low Overlap](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13005/) (2020)
- [PointNetLK: Robust & Efficient Point Cloud Registration using PointNet](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.05711/) (2019)
- [Geometric Transformer for Fast and Robust Point Cloud Registration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.06688/) (2022)
- [RPM-Net: Robust Point Matching using Learned Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.13479/) (2020)
- [PPFNet: Global Context Aware Local Features for Robust 3D Point Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.02669/) (2018)
- [Inverting Visual Representations with Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02753/) (2015)
- [The Perfect Match: 3D Point Cloud Matching with Smoothed Densities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.06879/) (2018)
- [PRNet: Self-Supervised Learning for Partial-to-Partial Registration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.12240/) (2019)
- [PPF-FoldNet: Unsupervised Learning of Rotation Invariant 3D Local Descriptors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.10322/) (2018)
- [SOSNet: Second Order Similarity Regularization for Local Descriptor Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05019/) (2019)
- [Feature-metric Registration: A Fast Semi-supervised Approach for Robust Point Cloud Registration without Correspondences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.01014/) (2020)
- [Robust Point Cloud Registration Framework Based on Deep Graph Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.04256/) (2021)
- [REGTR: End-to-end Point Cloud Correspondences with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.14517/) (2022)
- [Rotation-Invariant Transformer for Point Cloud Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08231/) (2023)
- [Revealing Scenes by Inverting Structure from Motion Reconstructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.03303/) (2019)
- [OMNet: Learning Overlapping Mask for Partial-to-Partial Point Cloud Registration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00937/) (2021)
- [Is Geometry Enough for Matching in Visual Localization?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12979/) (2022)
- [Solving the Blind Perspective-n-Point Problem End-To-End With Robust Differentiable Geometric Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.14628/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [CRFT: Consistent-Recurrent Feature Flow Transformer for Cross-Modal Image Registration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.05689/) (2026)
- [RBE-Flow: Recurrent Bayesian Estimation on Feature Manifolds for Cross-Modal Registration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.30492/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Structure-from-Motion (SfM) is the task of estimating 3D structure and camera poses from images. We define Collaborative SfM (ColabSfM) as sharing distributed SfM reconstructions. Sharing maps requires estimating a joint reference frame, which is typically referred to as registration. However, there is a lack of scalable methods and training datasets for registering SfM reconstructions. In this paper, we tackle this challenge by proposing the scalable task of point cloud registration for SfM reconstructions. We find that current registration methods cannot register SfM point clouds when trained on existing datasets. To this end, we propose a SfM registration dataset generation pipeline, leveraging partial reconstructions from synthetically generated camera trajectories for each scene. Finally, we propose a simple but impactful neural refiner on top of the SotA registration method RoITr that yields significant improvements, which we call RefineRoITr. Our extensive experimental evaluation shows that our proposed pipeline and model enables ColabSfM. Code is available at https://github.com/EricssonResearch/ColabSfM