Camera Motion Estimation for Multi-Camera Systems

The estimation of motion of multi-camera systems is one of the most important tasks in computer vision research. Recently, some issues have been raised about general camera models and multi-camera systems. Using many cameras as a single camera is studied [60], and the epipolar geometry constraints of general camera models is theoretically derived. Methods for calibration, including a self-calibration method for general camera models, are studied [78, 62]. Multi-camera systems are an example of practically implementable general camera models and they are widely used in many applications nowadays because of both the low cost of digital charge-coupled device (CCD) cameras and the high resolution of multiple images from the wide field of views. To our knowledge, no research has been conducted on the relative motion of multi-camera systems with non-overlapping views to obtain a geometrically optimal solution. ¶ In this thesis, we solve the camera motion problem for multi-camera systems by using linear methods and convex optimization techniques, and we make five substantial and original contributions to the field of computer vision. ..