Accurate measurement of orientation from stereo using line correspondence

The author analyzes a stereo method which determines lines in space from the intersection of projected planar sheets. Object descriptions are built from information about linear features instead of by points. It is shown that there are major advantages to accurately determining the orientation of object lines and surfaces using this stereo method. In the absence of errors (apart from the baseline translation error), the measurement of the orientation of lines and surfaces from this stereo method is translation-invariant in the sense that the orientation measurement is completely independent of knowledge of the baseline. Computer simulations of realistic imaging configurations show that, even in the presence of errors from other camera parameters, this stereo method is nearly translation-invariant and can far outperform stereo methods based on the absolute correspondence of points. Another advantage of determining the orientation of lines and surfaces from stereo using intersecting planes is that orientation errors do not grow rapidly as the object distance from the baseline increases