COLMAP is an automatic reconstruction tool that takes a folder of input images and produces a sparse and dense reconstruction in a workspace folder
Given a set of overlapping photos or video frames of the same scene it estimates:
- Camera positions - where each photo was taken from
- Camera intrinsics - focal length, distortion, and related parameters
- Sparse 3D point cloud - rough 3D structure from matched image features
COLMAP is used to turn images into a 3D scene representation