Revisiting Trifocal Tensor Estimation using Lines

Abstract—In this paper, we revisit the problem of estimating the trifocal tensor from image line measurements. With mea-surements of corresponding lines in three views, a linear method [1] requiring 13 lines was developed to estimate the trifocal tensor from which projective reconstruction of the scene is made possible. By further utilizing the nonlinear constraints on the trifocal tensor, we propose several new linear solvers that require fewer number of lines (10,11,12) than the previous linear method. We use methods based on algebraic geometry to incorporate the non-linear constraints in the estimation. We demonstrate the performance of the proposed solvers on synthetic data. We also test the solvers on real images and obtain promising results. I