Lens Distortion Recovery for Accurate Sequential Structure and Motion Recovery

Lens distortions in off-the-shelf or wide-angle cameras block the road to high accuracy Structure and Motion Recovery (SMR) from video sequences. Neglecting lens distortions introduces a systematic error buildup which causes recovered structure and motion to bend and inhibits turntable or other loop sequences to close perfectly. Locking back onto previously reconstructed structure can become impossible due to the large drift caused by the error buildup. Bundle adjustments are widely used to perform an ultimate post-minimization of the total reprojection error. However, the initial recovered structure and motion needs to be close to optimal to avoid local minima. We found that bundle adjustments cannot remedy the error buildup caused by ignoring lens distortions. The classical approach to distortion removal involves a preliminary distortion estimation using a calibration pattern, known geometric properties of perspective projections or only 2D feature correspondences. Often the distortion is assumed constant during camera usage and removed from the images before applying SMR algorithms. However, lens distortions can change by zooming, focusing and temperature variations. Moreover, when only the video sequence is available preliminary calibration is often not an option. This paper addresses all fore-mentioned problems by sequentially recovering lens distortions together with structure and motion from video sequences without tedious pre-calibrations and allowing lens distortions to change over time. The devised algorithms are fairly simple as they only use linear least squares techniques. The unprocessed video sequence forms the only input and no severe restrictions are placed on viewed scene geometry. Therefore, the accurate recovery of structure and motion is fully automated and widely applicable. The experiments demonstrate the necessity of modeling lens distortions to achieve high accuracy in recovered structure and motion.