Autocalibration & 3D reconstruction with non-central catadioptric cameras

We present a technique for modeling non-central catadioptric cameras consisting of perspective cameras and curved mirrors. The real catadioptric cameras have to be treated as non-central cameras, since they do not possess a single viewpoint. We present a method for solving the correspondence problem, auto-calibrating cameras, and computing a 3D metric reconstruction automatically from two uncalibrated non-central catadioptric images. The method is demonstrated on spherical, parabolic, and hyperbolic mirrors. We observed that the reconstruction & auto-calibration with non-central catadioptric cameras is as easy (or as difficult) as with central catadioptric cameras, provided that the correspondence problem can be solved with a suitable approximate central model. It turns out that it is the number of parameters of the camera model that matters rather than the exact centrality of the projection. Our technique allows to autocalibrate catadioptric cameras even with genuinely non-central mirrors such as spheres (simple model, low blur, easy to manufacture) or uniform resolution mirrors (optimized projection).