Five-Point Fundamental Matrix Estimation for Uncalibrated Cameras

We aim at estimating the fundamental matrix in two views from five correspondences of rotation invariant features obtained by e.g.\ the SIFT detector. The proposed minimal solver first estimates a homography from three correspondences assuming that they are co-planar and exploiting their rotational components. Then the fundamental matrix is obtained from the homography and two additional point pairs in general position. The proposed approach, combined with robust estimators like Graph-Cut RANSAC, is superior to other state-of-the-art algorithms both in terms of accuracy and number of iterations required. This is validated on synthesized data and $561$ real image pairs. Moreover, the tests show that requiring three points on a plane is not too restrictive in urban environment and locally optimized robust estimators lead to accurate estimates even if the points are not entirely co-planar. As a potential application, we show that using the proposed method makes two-view multi-motion estimation more accurate

Certifying the Existence of Epipolar Matrices

Given a set of point correspondences in two images, the existence of a fundamental matrix is a necessary condition for the points to be the images of a 3-dimensional scene imaged with two pinhole cameras. If the camera calibration is known then one requires the existence of an essential matrix. We present an efficient algorithm, using exact linear algebra, for testing the existence of a fundamental matrix. The input is any number of point correspondences. For essential matrices, we characterize the solvability of the Demazure polynomials. In both scenarios, we determine which linear subspaces intersect a fixed set defined by non-linear polynomials. The conditions we derive are polynomials stated purely in terms of image coordinates. They represent a new class of two-view invariants, free of fundamental (resp.~essential)~matrices

Self-Calibration of Cameras with Euclidean Image Plane in Case of Two Views and Known Relative Rotation Angle

The internal calibration of a pinhole camera is given by five parameters that are combined into an upper-triangular $3\times 3$ calibration matrix. If the skew parameter is zero and the aspect ratio is equal to one, then the camera is said to have Euclidean image plane. In this paper, we propose a non-iterative self-calibration algorithm for a camera with Euclidean image plane in case the remaining three internal parameters --- the focal length and the principal point coordinates --- are fixed but unknown. The algorithm requires a set of $N \geq 7$ point correspondences in two views and also the measured relative rotation angle between the views. We show that the problem generically has six solutions (including complex ones). The algorithm has been implemented and tested both on synthetic data and on publicly available real dataset. The experiments demonstrate that the method is correct, numerically stable and robust.Comment: 13 pages, 7 eps-figure

Cross-calibration of Time-of-flight and Colour Cameras

Time-of-flight cameras provide depth information, which is complementary to the photometric appearance of the scene in ordinary images. It is desirable to merge the depth and colour information, in order to obtain a coherent scene representation. However, the individual cameras will have different viewpoints, resolutions and fields of view, which means that they must be mutually calibrated. This paper presents a geometric framework for this multi-view and multi-modal calibration problem. It is shown that three-dimensional projective transformations can be used to align depth and parallax-based representations of the scene, with or without Euclidean reconstruction. A new evaluation procedure is also developed; this allows the reprojection error to be decomposed into calibration and sensor-dependent components. The complete approach is demonstrated on a network of three time-of-flight and six colour cameras. The applications of such a system, to a range of automatic scene-interpretation problems, are discussed.Comment: 18 pages, 12 figures, 3 table