PanoPose: Self-supervised Relative Pose Estimation for Panoramic Images

Diantao Tu, Hainan Cui, Xianwei Zheng, Shuhan Shen; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2024, pp. 20009-20018

Scaled relative pose estimation i.e. estimating relative rotation and scaled relative translation between two images has always been a major challenge in global Structure-from-Motion (SfM). This difficulty arises because the two-view relative translation computed by traditional geometric vision methods e.g. the five-point algorithm is scaleless. Many researchers have proposed diverse translation averaging methods to solve this problem. Instead of solving the problem in the motion averaging phase we focus on estimating scaled relative pose with the help of panoramic cameras and deep neural networks. In this paper a novel network namely PanoPose is proposed to estimate the relative motion in a fully self-supervised manner and a global SfM pipeline is built for panorama images. The proposed PanoPose comprises a depth-net and a pose-net with self-supervision achieved by reconstructing the reference image from its neighboring images based on the estimated depth and relative pose. To maintain precise pose estimation under large viewing angle differences we randomly rotate the panoramic images and pre-train the pose-net with images before and after the rotation. To enhance scale accuracy a fusion block is introduced to incorporate depth information into pose estimation. Extensive experiments on panoramic SfM datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of PanoPose compared with state-of-the-arts.