Estimating Motion and Structure from Correspondences of Line Segments between Two Perspective Images

We present in this paper an algorithm for determining 3D motion and structure from correspondences of line segments between two perspective images. To our knowledge, this paper is the rst investigation of use of line segments in motion and structure from motion. Classical methods use their geometric abstraction, namely straight lines, but then three images are necessary for the motion and structure determination process. In this paper we show that it is possible to recover motion from two views when using line segments. The assumption we use is that two matched line segments contain the projection of a common part of the corresponding line segment in space, i.e. they overlap. Indeed, this is what we use to match line segments between diierent views. This assumption constrains the possible motion between two views to an open set in motion parameter space. A heuristic, consisting in maximizing the overlap, leads to a unique solution. Both synthetic and real data have been used to test the proposed algorithm, and excellent results have been obtained with real data containing a relatively large set of line segments.