Motion estimation from spheres

Abstract

This paper addresses the problem of recovering epipolar geometry from spheres. Previous works have exploited epipolar tangencies induced by frontier points on the spheres for motion recovery. It will be shown in this paper that besides epipolar tangencies, N2 point features can be extracted from the apparent contours of the N spheres when N > 2. An algorithm for recovering the fundamental matrices from such point features and the epipolar tangencies from 3 or more spheres is developed, with the point features providing a homography over the view pairs and the epipolar tangencies determining the epipoles. In general, there will be two solutions to the locations of the epipoles. One of the solutions corresponds to the true camera configuration, while the other corresponds to a mirrored configuration. Several methods are proposed to select the right solution. Experiments on using 3 and 4 spheres demonstrate that our algorithm can be carried out easily and can achieve a high precision. © 2006 IEEE.