An experiment on relative rotation estimation from distant points with monocular vision

Abstract

This paper proposes a method to determine the relative rotation between two images acquired with a camera. It is considered that the camera is calibrated, and that the relative motion between the two images is small. The method is appropriate for a camera mounted on a moving vehicle and it is proven that the changes in yaw, pitch and roll angles can be accurately determined in this setup. We propose a RANSAC process that selects the distant points based on a new motion model for image pixels valid only for the points at infinite. Additionally, robustness of the method is increased by considering the fact that image deformations are 0 for the points at infinite.