Pose Estimation from Line Correspondences: A Complete Analysis and a Series of Solutions

Abstract

In this paper we deal with the camera pose estimation problem from a set of 2D/3D line correspondences, which is also known as PnL (Perspective-n-Line) problem. We carry out our study by comparing PnL with the well-studied PnP (Perspective-n-Point) problem, and our contributions are three-fold: (1) We provide a complete 3D configuration analysis for P3L, which includes the well-known P3P problem as well as several existing analyses as special cases. (2) By exploring the similarity between PnL and PnP, we propose a new subset-based PnL approach as well as a series of linear-formulation-based PnL approaches inspired by their PnP counterparts. (3) The proposed linear-formulation-based methods can be easily extended to deal with the line and point features simultaneously.