A Note on Principal Point Estimability

We provide elementary geometric arguments to show that the principal point of cameras with small to moderate field of view cannot be reliably estimated from natural, noisy images (the problem is ill-posed). We also show that in robot navigation and other noisy geometric vision applications the exact location of the principal point is irrelevant in practice. In these cases satisfactory metric structure can be recovered from minimal information by efficient algorithms using simplified camera models.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2002
• Where: ICPR
• Authors: Alberto Ruiz, Ginés García-Mateos, Pedro E. López-de-Teruel
• Keywords: Computer Vision, Elementary Geometric Arguments, ICPR 2002, Noisy Geometric Vision, Satisfactory Metric Structure