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Projective reconstruction and depth ambiguity

In the case of perspective cameras, we rewrite (1) for the all views and points as

 

If all the depth parameters are known, we can construct a measurement matrix and decompose it into camera motion and object shape using SVD in a similar manner as affine cases. This factorization has the following ambiguity; Let be the projective depths which give a measurement matrix that can be decomposed into motion and shape as in (10). Then the following equation holds for any 44 non-singular matrix and any non-zero scalars and :

where

 

From these two equations, we can observe two things:

Ambiguity of depths:
If one family of projective depths {} yields a measurement matrix that can be decomposed into motion and shape, another family {} given by (11) also yields a decomposable measurement matrix. Therefore, without loss of generality, we can choose one view, say i=1, and one object point, say k=1, and fix the depths associated with this view and this point to unity:

 

Consequently, the number of independent depth parameters is .

Ambiguity of reconstruction:
Assuming that we obtain two solutions and by factoring two measurement matrices constructed from two depth families {} and {},these two solutions are then related by using an unknown non-singular matrix and unknown scalars and as

 

Equation (13) means that we can recover motion and shape only up to an unknown projective transformation and can arbitrarily choose a 3D projective coordinate frame in terms of which structure of the motion and shape are described[2,4]. We call this kind of recovery projective reconstruction.



Bob Fisher
Wed Apr 21 20:23:11 BST 1999