Rotation averaging with application to camera-rig calibration

Abstract

We present a method for calibrating the rotation between two cameras in a camera rig in the case of non-overlapping fields of view and in a globally consistent manner. First, rotation averaging strategies are discussed and an L1-optimal rotation averaging algorithm is presented which is more robust than the L2-optimal mean and the direct least squares mean. Second, we alternate between rotation averaging across several views and conjugate rotation averaging to achieve a global solution. Various experiments both on synthetic data and a real camera rig are conducted to evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm. Experimental results suggest that the proposed algorithm realizes global consistency and a high precision estimate. © Springer-Verlag 2010.