Epipolar Geometry and Log–Polar Transform in Wide Baseline Stereo Matching

This paper presents an interesting observation that epipolar geometry and log–polar transform can be nat-urally combined by setting the center of the log–polar transform into the epipoles. This choice preserves the linearity of the epipolar lines. Moreover, the setting is especially advantageous, when camera moves to-wards the optical axis of the camera as the log–polar transform compensates the large scale changes in the scene. This practically implies that conventional match-ing techniques can be used with wide baseline images. We discuss the approach with both calibrated and un-calibrated cameras and show some dense wide baseline reconstruction examples where the epipoles are close to the image centers. 1