A global linear method for camera pose registration

Abstract

We present a linear method for global camera pose registration from pair wise relative poses encoded in essential matrices. Our method minimizes an approximate geometric error to enforce the triangular relationship in camera triplets. This formulation does not suffer from the typical 'unbalanced scale' problem in linear methods relying on pair wise translation direction constraints, i.e. an algebraic error, nor the system degeneracy from collinear motion. In the case of three cameras, our method provides a good linear approximation of the trifocal tensor. It can be directly scaled up to register multiple cameras. The results obtained are accurate for point triangulation and can serve as a good initialization for final bundle adjustment. We evaluate the algorithm performance with different types of data and demonstrate its effectiveness. Our system produces good accuracy, robustness, and outperforms some well-known systems on efficiency. © 2013 IEEE.