C-DOG: Training-Free Multi-View Multi-Object Association in Dense Scenes Without Visual Feature via Connected δ-Overlap Graphs

Abstract: Multi-view multi-object association is a fundamental step in 3D reconstruction pipelines, enabling consistent grouping of object instances across multiple camera views. Existing methods often rely on appearance features or geometric constraints such as epipolar consistency. However, these approaches can fail when objects are visually indistinguishable or observations are corrupted by noise. We propose C-DOG, a training-free framework that serves as an intermediate module bridging object detection (or pose estimation) and 3D reconstruction, without relying on visual features. It combines connected delta-overlap graph modeling with epipolar geometry to robustly associate detections across views. Each 2D observation is represented as a graph node, with edges weighted by epipolar consistency. A delta-neighbor-overlap clustering step identifies strongly consistent groups while tolerating noise and partial connectivity. To further improve robustness, we incorporate Interquartile Range (IQR)-based filtering and a 3D back-projection error criterion to eliminate inconsistent observations. Extensive experiments on synthetic benchmarks demonstrate that C-DOG outperforms geometry-based baselines and remains robust under challenging conditions, including high object density, without visual features, and limited camera overlap, making it well-suited for scalable 3D reconstruction in real-world scenarios.