Recovering Camera Pose from Omni-directional Images

Omni-directional images are widely used in image-based walkthrough applications, in which camera pose recovery is one of the initial and important processes. Existing methods may recover camera pose of omnidirectional images from lines. However, it may not work well when there is insufficient scene structure in the images. In addition, existing methods involve non-linear optimization and iterative algorithms, which may lead to the convergence problem and high computational cost. In this paper, we propose an automatic camera pose recovery method for a network of omni-directional images. Our method only requires 2D point correspondences as input. We divide the problem into the orientation and position components, and determine them separately. The relative rotations between adjacent views are aggregated to estimate the global orientations. An algorithm is developed to adjust the rotations for avoiding global inconsistency and error accumulation. For position recovery, we have derived a linear global formulation for establishing correspondences and positions among multiple views. Globally optimized positions can be obtained simply by solving the formulation. We demonstrate the performance of our method with some experiments.