Pose Estimation with Unknown Focal Length Using Points, Directions and Lines

Yubin Kuang, Kalle Astrom; Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2013, pp. 529-536

In this paper, we study the geometry problems of estimating camera pose with unknown focal length using combination of geometric primitives. We consider points, lines and also rich features such as quivers, i.e. points with one or more directions. We formulate the problems as polynomial systems where the constraints for different primitives are handled in a unified way. We develop efficient polynomial solvers for each of the derived cases with different combinations of primitives. The availability of these solvers enables robust pose estimation with unknown focal length for wider classes of features. Such rich features allow for fewer feature correspondences and generate larger inlier sets with higher probability. We demonstrate in synthetic experiments that our solvers are fast and numerically stable. For real images, we show that our solvers can be used in RANSAC loops to provide good initial solutions.