Factorization methods for projective structure and motion

Abstract

This paper describes a family of factorization-based algorithms that recover 3D projective structure and motion from multiple uncalibrated perspective images of 3D points and lines. They can be viewed as generalizations of the Tomasi-Kanade algorithm from affine to fully perspective cameras, and from points to lines. They make no restrictive assumptions about scene or camera geometry, and unlike most existing reconstruction methods they do not rely on 'privileged' points or images. All of the available image data is used, and each feature in each image is treated uniformly. The key to projective factorization is the recovery of a consistent set of projective depths (scale factors) for the image points: this is done using fundamental matrices and epipoles estimated from the image data. We compare the performance of the new techniques with several existing ones, and also describe an approximate factorization method that gives similar results to SVD-based factorization, but runs much more quickly for large problems.