An Efficient Algebraic Solution to the Perspective-Three-Point Problem

Tong Ke, Stergios I. Roumeliotis; Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2017, pp. 7225-7233

In this work, we present an algebraic solution to the classical perspective-3-point (P3P) problem for determining the position and attitude of a camera from observations of three known reference points. In contrast to previous approaches, we first directly determine the camera's attitude by employing the corresponding geometric constraints to formulate a system of trigonometric equations. This is then efficiently solved, following an algebraic approach, to determine the unknown rotation matrix and subsequently the camera's position. As compared to recent alternatives, our method avoids computing unnecessary (and potentially numerically unstable) intermediate results, and thus achieves higher numerical accuracy and robustness at a lower computational cost. These benefits are validated through extensive Monte-Carlo simulations for both nominal and close-to-singular geometric configurations.