New Efficient Solution to the Absolute Pose Problem for Camera with Unknown Focal Length and Radial Distortion

Martin Bujnak, Zuzana Kukelova, Tomás Pajdla

Abstract: In this paper we present a new efficient solution to the absolute pose problem for a camera with unknown focal length and radial distortion from four 2D-to-3D point correspondences. We propose to solve the problem separately for non-planar and for planar scenes. By decomposing the problem into these two situations we obtain simpler and more efficient solver than the previously known general solver. We demonstrate in synthetic and real experiments significant speedup as our new solvers are about 40× (non-planar) and 160× (planar) faster than the general solver. Moreover, we show that our two solvers can be joined into a new general solver, which gives comparable or better results than the existing general solver for of most planar as well as non-planar scenes.