Linear N-Point Camera Pose Determination

ÐThe determination of camera position and orientation from known correspondences of 3D reference points and their images is known as pose estimation in computer vision and space resection in photogrammetry. It is wellknown that from three corresponding points there are at most four algebraic solutions. Less appears to be known about the cases of four and five corresponding points. In this paper, we propose a family of linear methods that yield a unique solution to 4and 5-point pose determination for generic reference points. We first review the 3-point algebraic method. Then we present our twostep, 4-point and one-step, 5-point linear algorithms. The 5-point method can also be extended to handle more than five points. Finally, we demonstrate our methods on both simulated and real images. We show that they do not degenerate for coplanar configurations and even outperform the special linear algorithm for coplanar configurations in practice. Index TermsÐPose estimation, space resection, 2D-3D image orientation, exterior orientation determination, perspective-n-point-problem, four points, five points.