Experimental Evaluation of Relative Pose Estimation Algorithms

Abstract: We give an extensive experimental comparison of four popular relative pose (epipolar geometry) estimation algorithms: the eight, seven, six and five point algorithms. We focus on the practically important case that only a single solution may be returned by automatically selecting one of the solution candidates, and investigate the choice of error measure for the selection. We show that the five point algorithm gives very good results with automatic selection. As sometimes the eight point algorithm is better, we propose a combination algorithm which selects from the solutions of both algorithms and thus combines their strengths. We further investigate the behavior in the presence of outliers by using adaptive RANSAC, and give practical recommendations for the choice of the RANSAC parameters. Finally, we verify the simulation results on real data.