Automatic Euclidean reconstruction for turn-table sequences by indirect epipolar search between pairs of views

A new method is described to solve the structure from motion problem when the camera is only subject to a negligible rotation around its optical axis (the ‘roll’ rotation). The indirect epipolar search is a four-dimensional search, where the parameters are the two angles corresponding to the two remaining rotation axes of each camera. By ‘indirect’, we mean that there is no explicit computation of fundamental matrices or epipole locations. The approach is interesting in the fact that the epipolar space scrutinized is much less sensitive to noise than the fundamental matrix space (which we call the ‘direct’ epipolar space). The method is particularly adapted to turn-table video-sequences, where the roll-rotation is non-existent, but we will show that it could also be used with no a-priori knowledge of the camera motion.