DOI 10.1007/s11263-009-0226-0 Linear Quasi-Parallax SfM Using Laterally-Placed Eyes

Abstract A large class of visual systems in the biological world often has multiple eyes in simultaneous motion and yet has little or no overlap in the visual fields between the eyes. These systems include the lateral eyes found in many vertebrates and the compound eyes in insects. Instead of computing feature correspondences between the eyes, which might not even be possible due to the lack of overlap in the visual fields, we exploit the organizational possibility of-fered by the eye topography. In particular, we leverage on the pair of visual rays that are parallel to each other but opposite in direction, and compute what we call the quasi-parallax for translation recovery. Besides resulting in parsi-monious visual processing, the quasi-parallax term also en-hances the information pick-up for the translation, as it is almost rotation-free. The rotation is subsequently recovered from a pencil of visual rays using the individual epipolar constraints of each camera. As a result of using these dif-ferent and appropriate aspects of visual rays for motion re-covery, our method is numerically more effective in disam-biguating the translation and rotation. In comparison to the gold standard solution obtained by the bundle adjustment (BA) technique, our method has a better Fisher information matrix for a lateral eye pair, as well as a superior experimen-tal performance under the case of narrow field of view. Fo