Estimation of the epipole using optical flow at antipodal points

Abstract

We present algorithms for estimating the epipole or direction of translation of a moving camera. We use constraints arising from two points that are antipodal on the image sphere in order to decouple rotation from translation. One pair of antipodal points constrains the epipole to lie on a plane, and two such pairs will correspondingly give two planes. The intersection of these two planes is an estimate of the epipole. This means we require image motion measurements at two pairs of antipodal points to obtain an estimate. Two classes of algorithms are possible and we present two simple yet extremely robust algorithms representative of each class. These are shown to have comparable accuracy with the state of the art when tested in simulation under noise and with real image sequences.