Recursive Camera Autocalibration with the Kalman Filter

Given a projective reconstruction of a 3D scene, we address the problem of recovering the Euclidean structure of the scene in a recursive way. This leads to the application of Kalman filtering to the problem of camera autocalibration and to new algorithms for the autocalibration of cameras with varying parameters. This has benefits in saving memory and computational effort, and obtaining faster updates of the 3D Euclidean structure of the scene under consideration

The design of a robust 3D Reconstruction system for video sequences in non controlled environments

Along this thesis, a novel and robust approach for obtaining 3D models from video sequences captured with hand-held cameras is adressed. This work defines a fully automatic pipeline that is able to deal with diferent types of sequences and acquiring devices. The designed and implemented system follows a divide and conquer approach. An smart frame decimation process reduces the temporal redundancy of the input video sequence and selects the best conditioned frames for the reconstruction step. Next, the video is split into overlapped clips with a fixed and small number of Key-frames. This allows to parallelize the Structure and Motion process which translates into a dramatic reduction in the computational complexity. The short length of the clips allows an intensive search for the best solution at each step of the reconstruction, which improves the overall system performance. The process of feature tracking is embedded within the reconstruction loop for each clip as a difference with other approaches. The last contribution of this thesis is a final registration step that merges all the processed clips to the same coordinate frame. This last step consists on a set of linear algorithms that combine information of the structure (3D points) and motion (cameras) shared by partial reconstructions of the same static scene to more accurately estimate their registration to the same coordinate system. The performance for the presented algorithm as well as for the global system is demonstrated in experiments with real data

Auto-Calibration and Three-Dimensional Reconstruction for Zooming Cameras

This dissertation proposes new algorithms to recover the calibration parameters and 3D structure of a scene, using 2D images taken by uncalibrated stationary zooming cameras. This is a common configuration, usually encountered in surveillance camera networks, stereo camera systems, and event monitoring vision systems. This problem is known as camera auto-calibration (also called self-calibration) and the motivation behind this work is to obtain the Euclidean three-dimensional reconstruction and metric measurements of the scene, using only the captured images. Under this configuration, the problem of auto-calibrating zooming cameras differs from the classical auto-calibration problem of a moving camera in two major aspects. First, the camera intrinsic parameters are changing due to zooming. Second, because cameras are stationary in our case, using classical motion constraints, such as a pure translation for example, is not possible. In order to simplify the non-linear complexity of this problem, i.e., auto-calibration of zooming cameras, we have followed a geometric stratification approach. In particular, we have taken advantage of the movement of the camera center, that results from the zooming process, to locate the plane at infinity and, consequently to obtain an affine reconstruction. Then, using the assumption that typical cameras have rectangular or square pixels, the calculation of the camera intrinsic parameters have become possible, leading to the recovery of the Euclidean 3D structure. Being linear, the proposed algorithms were easily extended to the case of an arbitrary number of images and cameras. Furthermore, we have devised a sufficient constraint for detecting scene parallel planes, a useful information for solving other computer vision problems

Camera autocalibration using Plucker coordinates

We present new results on the Absolute Line Quadric (ALQ), the geometric object representing the set of lines that intersect the absolute conic. We include new techniques for the obtainment of the Euclidean structure that lead to an efficient algorithm for the autocalibration of cameras with varying parameters