Affine structure from translational motion in image sequences

Abstract

In this paper a method for obtaining affine structure from an image sequence taken by a translating camera with constant intrinsic parameters is presented. A general geometric constraint, expressed using the camera matrices, is derived and this constraint is used in a least squares solution of the problem. The first step is to obtain a projective reconstruction, in the form of a sequence of camera matrices (and a sparse set of feature points), and then these constraints are used to upgrade to an affine reconstruction. The proposed algorithm extends previous results of affine structure recovery from two images with a translating camera to the general case of a sequence of images. The proposed method is illustrated in both simulated and real experiments. © Springer-Verlag 2003.