Linear Global Translation Estimation with Feature Tracks

This paper derives a novel linear position constraint for cameras seeing a common scene point, which leads to a direct linear method for global camera translation estimation. Unlike previous solutions, this method deals with collinear camera motion and weak image association at the same time. The final linear formulation does not involve the coordinates of scene points, which makes it efficient even for large scale data. We solve the linear equation based on $L_1$ norm, which makes our system more robust to outliers in essential matrices and feature correspondences. We experiment this method on both sequentially captured images and unordered Internet images. The experiments demonstrate its strength in robustness, accuracy, and efficiency.Comment: Changes: 1. Adopt BMVC2015 style; 2. Combine sections 3 and 5; 3. Move "Evaluation on synthetic data" out to supplementary file; 4. Divide subsection "Evaluation on general data" to subsections "Experiment on sequential data" and "Experiment on unordered Internet data"; 5. Change Fig. 1 and Fig.8; 6. Move Fig. 6 and Fig. 7 to supplementary file; 7 Change some symbols; 8. Correct some typo