Motion of an uncalibrated stereo rig: self-calibration and metric reconstruction

Abstract

We address in this paper the problem of self-calibration and metric reconstruction (up to a scale) from one unknown motion of an uncalibrated stereo rig, assuming the coordinates of the principal point of each camera are known (This assumption is not necessary if one more motion is available). The epipolar constraint is rst formulated for two uncalibrated images. The problem then becomes one of estimating unknowns such that the discrepancy from the epipolar constraint, in terms of distances between points and their corresponding epipolar lines, is minimized. The initialization of the unknowns is based on the work of Maybank, Luong and Faugeras on self-calibration of a single moving camera, which requires to solve a set of so-called Kruppa equations. Redundancy of the information contained in a sequence of stereo images makes this method more robust than using a sequence of monocular images. Real data have been used to test the proposed method, and the results obtained are quite good.