3D Metric Reconstruction from Uncalibrated Omnidirectional Images

Abstract

We show that it is possible to obtain a very complete 3D metric reconstruction of the surrounding scene from two or more uncalibrated omnidirectional images. In particular, we demonstrate that omnidirectional images with angle of view above 180 can be reliably autocalibrated. We also show that wide angle images provide reliable information about their camera positions and orientations. We link together a method for simultaneous omnidirectional camera model and epipolar geometry estimation and a method for factorization-based 3D reconstruction in order to obtain metric reconstruction of unknown scene observed by uncalibrated omnidirectional images. The 3D reconstruction is done from automatically established image correspondences only. We demonstrate our method in experiments with Nikon FC–E8 and Sigma 8mm-f4-EX fish-eye lenses. Nevertheless, the proposed method can be used for a large class of non-perspective central omnidirectional cameras.