A three-point minimal solution for panoramic stitching with lens distortion

We present a minimal solution for aligning two images taken by a rotating camera from point correspondences. The solution particularly addresses the case where there is lens distortion in the images. We assume to know the two camera centers but not the focal lengths and allow the latter to vary. Our solution uses a minimal number (three) of point correspondences and is well suited to be used in a hypothesis testing framework. It does not suffer from numerical instabilities observed in other algebraic minimal solvers and is also efficient. We validate our solution in multi-image panoramic stitching on real images with lens distortion.