Motion Recovery for Uncalibrated Turntable Sequences Using Silhouettes and a Single Point

This paper addresses the problem of self-calibration and motion recovery for turntable sequences. Previous works exploited silhouette correspondences induced by epipolar tangencies to estimate the image invariants under turntable motion and recover the epipolar geometry. These approaches, however, require the camera intrinsics in order to obtain an Euclidean motion, and a dense sequence is required to provide a precise initialization of the image invariants. This paper proposes a novel approach to estimate the camera intrinsics, the image invariants and the rotation angles from a sparse turntable sequence. The silhouettes and a single point correspondence are extracted from the image sequence. The point traces out a conic in the sequence, from which the fixed entities (i.e., the image of the rotation axis, the horizon, the vanishing point of the coordinates, the circular points and a scalar) can be recovered given a simple initialization of the camera intrinsic matrix. The rotation angles are then recovered by estimating the epipoles that minimize the transfer errors of the outer epipolar tangents to the silhouettes for each pair of images. The camera intrinsics can be further refined by the above optimization. Based on a given range of the initial focal length, a robust method is proposed to give the best estimate of the camera intrinsics, the image invariants, the full camera positions and orientations, and hence a Euclidean reconstruction. Experimental results demonstrate the simplicity of this approach and the accuracy in the estimated motion and reconstruction.