A novel method of camera pose estimation by parabolic motion

Camera pose estimation is a basic and crucial problem in computer vision, accordingly a novel method is proposed for pose estimation based on parabolic motion in our paper. Firstly, the intersection of lines which are the image plane projection of free-falling trajectories in different locations is computed. According to the properties of vanishing point, the intersection is defined as the vanishing point in gravity direction. Secondly, the image plane projected curve of parabolic trajectory is obtained by Sampson Approximation. Finally, the camera pose is estimated by employing the projective geometry properties of vanishing point and vanishing line implicated in the projected parabola, provided that the intrinsic parameters of camera are specified. The absolute Euclidean distance of translation is obtained innovatively with the known frame frequency. Numerical simulation as well as practical experiment in this paper demonstrates the correctness and feasibility of our method, with the known frame frequency, as the experiment show that compared with the traditional checkerboard method the mean errors of rotation axis, rotation angle and translation are respectively 0.017 rad, 0.007 rad and 11.650 mm by our method. It can generally satisfy the accuracy requirements of camera.