Self-calibration of a stereo rig using monocular epipolar geometries

This paper addresses the problem of self-calibration from one unknown motion of an uncalibrated stereo rig. Unlike the existing methods for stereo rig self-calibration, which have been focused on applying the autocalibration paradigm using both motion and stereo correspondences, our method does not require the recovery of stereo correspondences. Our method combines purely algebraic constraints with implicit geometric constraints. Assuming that the rotational part of the stereo geometry has two unknown degrees of freedom (i.e., the third dof is roughly known), and that the principle point of each camera is known, we first show that the computation of the intrinsic and extrinsic parameters of the stereo rig can be recovered from the motion correspondences only, i.e., the monocular fundamental matrices. We then provide an initialization procedure for the proposed non-linear method. We provide an extensive performance study for the method in the presence of image noise. In addition, we study some of the aspects related to the 3D motion that govern the accuracy of the proposed self-calibration method. Experiments conducted on synthetic and real data/images demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed method.