Error analysis of pure rotation-based self-calibration

Self-calibration using pure rotation is a well-known technique, and has been shown to be a reliable means for recovering intrinsic camera parameters. However, in practice, it is virtually impossible to ensure that the camera motion for this type of self-calibration is a pure rotation. In this paper we present an error analysis of recovered intrinsic camera parameters due to the presence of translation. We derived closed-form error expressions for a single pair of images with non-degenerate motion; for multiple rotations, for which there are no closed-form solutions, analysis was done through repeated experiments. Among others, we show that translation-independent solutions do exist under certain practical conditions.