Radially-Distorted Conjugate Translations

James Pritts, Zuzana Kukelova, Viktor Larsson, Ondřej Chum; Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2018, pp. 1993-2001

This paper introduces the first minimal solvers that jointly solve for affine-rectification and radial lens distortion from coplanar repeated patterns. Even with imagery from moderately distorted lenses, plane rectification using the pinhole camera model is inaccurate or invalid. The proposed solvers incorporate lens distortion into the camera model and extend accurate rectification to wide-angle imagery, which is now common from consumer cameras. The solvers are derived from constraints induced by the conjugate translations of an imaged scene plane, which are integrated with the division model for radial lens distortion. The hidden-variable trick with ideal saturation is used to reformulate the constraints so that the solvers generated by the Gr{\"o}bner-basis method are stable, small and fast. The proposed solvers are used in a RANSAC-based estimator. Rectification and lens distortion are recovered from either one conjugately translated affine-covariant feature or two independently translated similarity-covariant features. Experiments confirm that RANSAC accurately estimates the rectification and radial distortion with very few iterations. The proposed solvers are evaluated against the state-of-the-art for affine rectification and radial distortion estimation.