Structure and motion estimation from rolling shutter video

Johan Hedborg, Erik Ringaby, Per-Erik Forssén, Michael Felsberg

Abstract: The majority of consumer quality cameras sold today have CMOS sensors with rolling shutters. In a rolling-shutter camera, images are read out row by row, and thus each row is exposed during a different time interval. A rolling-shutter exposure causes geometric image distortions when either the camera or the scene is moving, and this causes state-of-the-art structure and motion algorithms to fail. We demonstrate a novel method for solving the structure and motion problem for rolling-shutter video. The method relies on exploiting the continuity of the camera motion, both between frames, and across a frame. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method by controlled experiments on real video sequences. We show, both visually and quantitatively, that our method outperforms standard structure and motion, and is more accurate and efficient than a two-step approach, doing image rectification and structure and motion.