Rolling Shutter and Radial Distortion Are Features for High Frame Rate Multi-Camera Tracking

Akash Bapat, True Price, Jan-Michael Frahm; Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2018, pp. 4824-4833

Traditionally, camera-based tracking approaches have treated rolling shutter and radial distortion as imaging artifacts that have to be overcome and corrected for in order to apply standard camera models and scene reconstruction methods. In this paper, we introduce a novel multi-camera tracking approach that for the first time jointly leverages the information introduced by rolling shutter and radial distortion as a feature to achieve superior performance with respect to high-frequency camera pose estimation. In particular, our system is capable of attaining high tracking rates that were previously unachievable. Our approach explicitly leverages rolling shutter capture and radial distortion to process individual rows, rather than entire image frames, for accurate camera motion estimation. We estimate a per-row 6 DoF pose of a rolling shutter camera by tracking multiple points on a radially distorted row whose rays span a curved surface in 3D space. Although tracking systems for rolling shutter cameras exist, we are the first to leverage radial distortion to measure a per-row pose -- enabling us to use less than half the number of cameras required by the previous state of the art. We validate our system on both synthetic and real imagery.