A ROBUST METHOD FOR FUNDAMENTAL MATRIX ESTIMATION WITH RADIAL DISTORTION

Abstract. Fundamental Matrix Estimation is of vital importance in many vision applications and is a core part of 3D reconstruction pipeline. Radial distortion makes the problem to be numerically challenging. We propose a novel robust method for radial fundamental matrix estimation. Firstly, two-sided radial fundamental matrix is deduced to describe epipolar geometry relationship between two distorted images. Secondly, we use singular value decomposition to solve the final nonlinear minimization solutions and to get the outliers removed by multiplying a weighted matrix to the coefficient matrix. In every iterative step, the criterion which is the distance between feature point and corresponding epipolar line is used to determine the inliers and the weighted matrix is update according to it. The iterative process has a fast convergence rate, and the estimation result of radial fundamental matrix remains stable even at the condition of many outliers. Experimental results prove that the proposed method is of high accuracy and robust for estimating the radial fundamental matrix. The estimation result of radial fundamental matrix could be served as the initialization for structure from motion.