A new method for camera stratified self-calibration under circular motion

We consider the stratified self-calibration (affine and metric reconstruction) problem from images acquired with a camera with unchanging internal parameters undergoing circular motion. The general stratified method (modulus constraints) is known to fail with this motion. In this paper we give a novel constraint on the plane at infinity in projective reconstruction for circular motion, the constant inter-frame motion constraint on the plane at infinity between every two adjacent views and a fixed view of the motion sequences, by making use of the facts that in many commercial systems rotation angles are constant. An initial solution can be obtained by using the first three views of the sequence, and Stratified Iterative Particle Swarm Optimization (SIPSO) is proposed to get an accurate and robust solution when more views are at hand. Instead of using the traditional optimization algorithm as the last step to obtain an accurate solution, in this paper, the whole motion sequence information is exploited before computing the camera calibration matrix, this results in a more accurate and robust solution. Once the plane at infinity is identified, the calibration matrices of the camera and a metric reconstruction can be readily obtained. Experiments on both synthetic and real image sequence are given, showing the accuracy and robustness of the new algorithm.