Linear N⩾4-point pose determination

The determination of the position and the orientation of the camera from the known correspondences of the reference points and the image points is known as the problem of pose estimation in computer vision or space resection in photogrammetry. It is well known that using 3 corresponding points has at most 4 solutions. Less appears to be known about the cases of 4 and 5 points. In this paper, we describe linear solutions that always give the unique solution to 4-point and 5-point pose determination for the reference points not lying on the critical configurations. The same linear method can also be extended to any n⩾5 points. The robustness and accuracy of the method are experimented both on simulated and real images