Structure from Motion Using Rigidly Coupled Cameras without Overlapping Views

Structure from Motion can be improved by using multicamera systems without overlapping views to provide a large combined field of view. The extrinsic calibration of such camera systems can be computed from local reconstructions using hand-eye calibration techniques. Nevertheless these approaches demand that motion constraints resulting from the rigid coupling of the cameras are satisfied which is in general not the case for decoupled pose estimation. This paper presents an extension to Structure from Motion using multiple rigidly coupled cameras that integrates rigid motion constraints already into the local pose estimation step, based on dual quaternions for pose representation. It is shown in experiments with synthetic and real data that the overall quality of the reconstruction process is improved and pose error accumulation is counteracted, leading to more accurate extrinsic calibration.