Finding the Epipole from
Uncalibrated Optical Flow

Alessandro Verri
Dipartimento di Fisica
Università di Genova, Italia
verri@infn.ge.it - Emanuele Trucco
Heriot-Watt University
Department of Computing and Electrical Engineering
Edinburgh, UK
mtc@cee.hw.ac.uk

Abstract:

This paper presents a novel method for determining the location of the instantaneous epipole in a sequence of images acquired by an uncalibrated camera and containing a single, rigid motion ( e.g. , the camera moves in a static environment). The method uses the full perspective camera model and requires the estimation of the optical flow at a minimum of six image locations. The key observation is that the optical flow equations can be written in terms of the instantaneous epipole in a strikingly simple form if the translational and rotational flow components are not separated as done usually. The epipole location can then be obtained as the minimum of a least-square residual function associated to the computed optical flow. We report and discuss initial experiments on both synthetic and real data indicating the reliability of the method.

• 1 Introduction
• 2 The motion field equations revisited
• 3 Computing the epipole
• 4 Experimental results
• 5 Discussion
• References