Relative Orientation Revisited

Relative Orientation is the recovery of the position and orientation of one imaging system relative to another from correspondences between five or more ray pairs. It is one of four core problems in photogrammetry and is of central importance in binocular stereo, as well as in long range motion vision. While five ray correspondences are sufficient to yield a finite number of solutions, more than five correspondences are used in practice to ensure an accurate solution using least squares methods. Most iterative schemes for minimizing the sum of squares of weighted errors require a good guess as a starting value. The author has previously published amethod that finds the best solution without requiring an initial guess. In this paper an even simpler method is presented that utilizes the representation of rotations by unit quaternions.