Projective reconstruction of ellipses from multiple images

This paper presents a new approach for reconstructing 3D ellipses (including circles) from a sequence of 2D images taken by uncalibrated cameras. Our strategy is to estimate an ellipse in 3D space by reconstructing N(≥5)N(≥5) 3D points (called representative points) on it, where the representative points are reconstructed by minimizing the distances from their projections to the measured 2D ellipses on different images (i.e., 2D reprojection error). This minimization problem is transformed into a sequence of minimization sub-problems that can be readily solved by an algorithm which is guaranteed to converge to a (local) minimum of the 2D reprojection error. Our method can reconstruct multiple 3D ellipses simultaneously from multiple images and it readily handles images with missing and/or partially occluded ellipses. The proposed method is evaluated using both synthetic and real data.