Multi-View Geometry of the Refractive Plane

Transparent refractive objects are one of the main problems in geometric vision that have been largely unexplored. The imaging and multi-view geometry of scenes with transparent or translucent objects with refractive properties is relatively less well understood than for opaque objects. The main objective of our work is to analyze the underlying multi-view relationships between cameras, when the scene being viewed contains a single refractive planar surface separating two different media. Such a situation might occur in scenarios like underwater photography. Our main result is to show the existence of geometric entities like the fundamental matrix, and the homography matrix in such instances. In addition, under special circumstances we also show how to compute the relative pose between two cameras immersed in one of the two media.