Recovery of Epipolar Geometry from Points

In this chapter, we present a number of methods to recover the epipolar geometry between two images from point matches. When the images are calibrated (i.e. their intrinsic parameters are known), the problem is equivalent to determining motion and structure. This has been widely studied in the last fifteen years. The minimum number of required point matches is five, which may give at most ten real solutions [39]. If more than 5 point matches are given, there usually exists a unique solution. When 8 or more point matches are available, a linear technique exists to solve the motion, which, however, usually yields an estimate sensitive to noise. Least-squares techniques are exploited to obtain a more robust estimate. Readers are referred to [41, Chap.7] for a complete exposition of the problem of motion and structure from motion.