Affine Structure and Motion from Points, Lines and Conics

Abstract

In this paper several new methods for estimating scene structure and camera motion from an image sequence taken by affine cameras are presented. All methods can incorporate both point, line and conic features in a unified manner. The correspondence between features in different images is assumed to be known. Three new tensor representations are introduced describing the viewing geometry for two and three cameras. The centred affine epipoles can be used to constrain the location of corresponding points and conics in two images. The third order, or alternatively, the reduced third order centred affine tensors can be used to constrain the locations of corresponding points, lines and conics in three images. The reduced third order tensors contain only 12 components compared to the 16 components obtained when reducing the trifocal tensor to affine cameras. A new factorization method is presented. The novelty lies in the ability to handle not only point features, but also line and conic features concurrently. Another complementary method based on the so-called closure constraints is also presented. The advantage of this method is the ability to handle missing data in a simple and uniform manner. Finally, experiments performed on both simulated and real data are given, including a comparison with other methods.