Global Motion Estimation from Point Matches

Multiview structure recovery from a collection of images requires the recovery of the positions and orientations of the cameras relative to a global coordinate system. Our approach recovers camera motion as a sequence of two global optimizations. First, pair wise Essential Matrices are used to recover the global rotations by applying robust optimization using either spectral or semi definite programming relaxations. Then, we directly employ feature correspondences across images to recover the global translation vectors using a linear algorithm based on a novel decomposition of the Essential Matrix. Our method is efficient and, as demonstrated in our experiments, achieves highly accurate results on collections of real images for which ground truth measurements are available.