Rotation-Only Bundle Adjustment

TL;DR

This paper introduces a method for estimating camera rotations independently of positions and scene structure, improving accuracy and robustness in 3D reconstruction tasks.

Contribution

It presents a novel rotation-only bundle adjustment approach that decouples rotation estimation from translation and scene structure, enhancing accuracy and robustness.

Findings

Significant accuracy improvements over traditional methods

Robustness to translation and structure inaccuracies

Consistent performance on synthetic and real datasets

Abstract

We propose a novel method for estimating the global rotations of the cameras independently of their positions and the scene structure. When two calibrated cameras observe five or more of the same points, their relative rotation can be recovered independently of the translation. We extend this idea to multiple views, thereby decoupling the rotation estimation from the translation and structure estimation. Our approach provides several benefits such as complete immunity to inaccurate translations and structure, and the accuracy improvement when used with rotation averaging. We perform extensive evaluations on both synthetic and real datasets, demonstrating consistent and significant gains in accuracy when used with the state-of-the-art rotation averaging method.