The Active Camera as a Projective Pointing Device

This paper demonstrates an approach which exploits an active camera as a projective pointing mechanism. The optical centre of a static camera is notionally substituted by the centre of rotation of the active camera, as is the image plane by a frontal plane, a plane perpendicular to the optical axis of the active camera in its resting direction. Algorithms devised for 3D motion and 3D structure recovery using a single passive camera become immediately applicable to the active camera without need for reformulation. Furthermore, because the active camera can access a panoramic field of view, instabilities which may arise when the field of view is small, or because the shared field of view between successive views after movement is small, are lessened. Two quite different applications of the idea are presented. In the first, the homography between a planar surface in the scene and the frontal plane is recovered and used to recover scene trajectories. In the second, the essential matrix between points in two frontal-plane "views" is recovered and used to determine the motion of a mobile vehicle.