A Case Against Kruppa's Equations for Camera Self-Calibration

  • Authors:
  • Peter Sturm

  • Affiliations:
  • INRIA Rhône-Alpes, St. Martin, France

  • Venue:
  • IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence
  • Year:
  • 2000

Quantified Score

Hi-index 0.14

Visualization

Abstract

We consider the self-calibration problem for perspective cameras and especially the classical Kruppa equation approach. It is known that for several common types of camera motion, self-calibration is degenerate, which manifests itself through the existence of ambiguous solutions. In a previous paper, we have studied these critical motion sequences and have revealed their importance for practical applications. Here, we reveal a type of camera motion that is not critical for the generic self-calibration problem, but for which the Kruppa equation approach fails. This is the case if the optical centers of all cameras lie on a sphere and if the optical axes pass through the sphere's center, a very natural situation for 3D object modeling from images. Results of simulated experiments demonstrate the instability of numerical self-calibration algorithms in near-degenerate configurations.