QUARCH: A New Quasi-Affine Reconstruction Stratum From Vague Relative Camera Orientation Knowledge

International audienceWe present a new quasi-affine reconstruction of a scene and its application to camera self-calibration. We refer to this reconstruction as QUARCH (QUasi-Affine Reconstruction with respect to Camera centers and the Hodographs of horopters). A QUARCH can be obtained by solving a semidefinite programming problem when, (i) the images have been captured by a moving camera with constant intrinsic parameters, and (ii) a vague knowledge of the relative orientation (under or over 120°) between camera pairs is available. The resulting reconstruction comes close enough to an affine one allowing thus an easy upgrade of the QUARCH to its affine and metric counterparts. We also present a constrained Levenberg-Marquardt method for nonlinear optimization subject to Linear Matrix Inequality (LMI) constraints so as to ensure that the QUARCH LMIs are satisfied during optimization. Experiments with synthetic and real data show the benefits of QUARCH in reliably obtaining a metric reconstruction

QUARCH: A New Quasi-Affine Reconstruction Stratum From Vague Relative Camera Orientation Knowledge

International audienceWe present a new quasi-affine reconstruction of a scene and its application to camera self-calibration. We refer to this reconstruction as QUARCH (QUasi-Affine Reconstruction with respect to Camera centers and the Hodographs of horopters). A QUARCH can be obtained by solving a semidefinite programming problem when, (i) the images have been captured by a moving camera with constant intrinsic parameters, and (ii) a vague knowledge of the relative orientation (under or over 120°) between camera pairs is available. The resulting reconstruction comes close enough to an affine one allowing thus an easy upgrade of the QUARCH to its affine and metric counterparts. We also present a constrained Levenberg-Marquardt method for nonlinear optimization subject to Linear Matrix Inequality (LMI) constraints so as to ensure that the QUARCH LMIs are satisfied during optimization. Experiments with synthetic and real data show the benefits of QUARCH in reliably obtaining a metric reconstruction

Combining Mendonça-Cipolla self-calibration and scene constraints

International audienceIn this paper, we propose a method that combines plane parallelism and the Mendonça/Cipolla self-calibration constraints. In our method each pair of images is treated independently and can therefore use a different pair of parallel planes not necessarily visible in the other views. While, for each pair of images, constraints on the singular values of the essential matrix provide two algebraic constraints on the intrinsic parameters, those we derive from plane parallelism have the advantage of providing two additional ones making the calibration of a no-skew camera possible from two images only

A New Set of Quartic Trivariate Polynomial Equations for Stratied Camera Self-calibrationunder Zero-Skew and Constant Parameters Assumptions

peer reviewedThis paper deals with the problem of self-calibrating a moving camera with constant parameters. We propose a new set of quartic trivariate polynomial equations in the unknown coordinates of the plane at infinity derived under the no-skew assumption. Our new equations allow to further enforce the constancy of the principal point across all images while retrieving the plane at infinity. Six such polynomials, four of which are independent, are obtained for each triplet of images. The proposed equations can be solved along with the so-called modulus constraints and allow to improve the performance of existing methods

A new set of quartic trivariate polynomial equations for stratified camera self-calibration under zero-skew and constant parameters assumptions

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Robust Range-Only Mapping via Sum-of-Squares Polynomials

International audienceThis work presents a new approach for mapping static beacons given only range measurements. An original formulation using sum-of-squares and linear matrix inequalities is derived to test if a measurement is inconsistent with a bounding box containing the beacon position. By performing this test for each range measurement, it is possible to recursively eliminate incompatible boxes and find the smallest consistent box. The box search is done with a breadth-first search algorithm that recursively prunes inconsistent boxes and splits the others to narrow the estimation. The validity of the method is asserted via simulations and compared to other standard mapping methods. Different levels and types of noise are added to evaluate the performances of the algorithm. It resulted that the approach accommodates very well classical zero-mean white Gaussian noises by adaptating the ratio of tolerated outliers for the consistency check, but fails to handle additive biases

Robust and Optimal Registration of Image Sets and Structured Scenes via Sum-of-Squares Polynomials

International audienceThis paper addresses the problem of registering a known structured 3D scene, typically a 3D scan, and its metric Structure-from-Motion (SfM) counterpart. The proposed registration method relies on a prior plane segmentation of the 3D scan. Alignment is carried out by solving either the point-to-plane assignment problem, should the SfM reconstruction be sparse, or the plane-to-plane one in case of dense SfM. A Polynomial Sum-of-Squares optimization theory framework is employed for identifying point-to-plane and plane-to-plane mismatches, i.e. outliers, with certainty. An inlier set maximization approach within a Branch-and-Bound search scheme is adopted to iteratively build potential inlier sets and converge to the solution satisfied by the largest number of assignments. Plane visibility conditions and vague camera locations may be incorporated for better efficiency without sacrificing optimality. The registration problem is solved in two cases: (i) putative correspondences (with possibly overwhelmingly many outliers) are provided as input and (ii) no initial correspondences are available. Our approach yields outstanding results in terms of robustness and optimality

Localization of 2D Cameras in a Known Environment using Direct 2D-3D Registration

International audienceIn this paper we propose a robust and direct 2D-to- 3D registration method for localizing 2D cameras in a known 3D environment. Although the 3D environment is known, localizing the cameras remains a challenging problem that is particularly undermined by the unknown 2D-3D correspondences, outliers, scale ambiguities and occlusions. Once the cameras are localized, the Structure-from-Motion reconstruction obtained from image correspondences is refined by means of a constrained nonlinear optimization that benefits from the knowledge of the scene. We also propose a common optimization framework for both localization and refinement steps in which projection errors in one view are minimized while preserving the existing relationships between images. The problem of occlusion and that of missing scene parts are handled by employing a scale histogram while the effect of data inaccuracies is minimized using an M-estimator- based technique

Localization of 2D Cameras in a Known Environment using Direct 2D-3D Registration

International audienceIn this paper we propose a robust and direct 2D-to- 3D registration method for localizing 2D cameras in a known 3D environment. Although the 3D environment is known, localizing the cameras remains a challenging problem that is particularly undermined by the unknown 2D-3D correspondences, outliers, scale ambiguities and occlusions. Once the cameras are localized, the Structure-from-Motion reconstruction obtained from image correspondences is refined by means of a constrained nonlinear optimization that benefits from the knowledge of the scene. We also propose a common optimization framework for both localization and refinement steps in which projection errors in one view are minimized while preserving the existing relationships between images. The problem of occlusion and that of missing scene parts are handled by employing a scale histogram while the effect of data inaccuracies is minimized using an M-estimator- based technique

LMI-based 2D-3D Registration: from Uncalibrated Images to Euclidean Scene

International audienceThis paper investigates the problem of registering a scanned scene, represented by 3D Euclidean point coordinates , and two or more uncalibrated cameras. An unknown subset of the scanned points have their image projections detected and matched across images. The proposed approach assumes the cameras only known in some arbitrary projective frame and no calibration or autocalibration is required. The devised solution is based on a Linear Matrix Inequality (LMI) framework that allows simultaneously estimating the projective transformation relating the cameras to the scene and establishing 2D-3D correspondences without triangulating image points. The proposed LMI framework allows both deriving triangulation-free LMI cheirality conditions and establishing putative correspondences between 3D volumes (boxes) and 2D pixel coordinates. Two registration algorithms, one exploiting the scene's structure and the other concerned with robustness, are presented. Both algorithms employ the Branch-and-Prune paradigm and guarantee convergence to a global solution under mild initial bound conditions. The results of our experiments are presented and compared against other approaches