Opening the Black Box of 3D Reconstruction Error Analysis with VECTOR

This is the author's version of the article that has been published in the proceedings of IEEE Visualization conference. The final version of this record is available at: xx.xxxx/TVCG.201x.xxxxxxx/ This metric also provides no visibility into how particular Reconstruction of 3D scenes from 2D images is a technical challenge images, lighting conditions, camera positions, or details of the that impacts domains from Earth and planetary sciences and morphology of the remote environment might interact to create inaccuracies space exploration to augmented and virtual reality. The impact of these unknowns algorithms first identify common features across images compounds in domains where high accuracy terrain reconstruction and then minimize reconstruction errors after estimating the is critical to outcomes, like science or space exploration where there shape of the terrain. This bundle adjustment (BA) step optimizes is no ground truth and inaccurate reconstruction can lead to false around a single, simplifying scalar value that obfuscates many possible results or risking billion-dollar spacecraft.