Robust and Accurate Cylinder Triangulation

TL;DR

This paper introduces a robust method for triangulating infinite cylinders from image silhouettes by constraining the conic to a circle, resulting in accurate and efficient estimation algorithms tested on synthetic and real data.

Contribution

It proposes a novel algebraic approach constraining the conic to a circle, enabling fast minimal and least squares solvers for cylinder triangulation from silhouettes.

Findings

The minimal solver works with three silhouette lines.

The constrained least squares method improves accuracy.

Algorithms outperform previous methods on synthetic and real data.

Abstract

In this paper we present methods for triangulation of infinite cylinders from image line silhouettes. We show numerically that linear estimation of a general quadric surface is inherently a badly posed problem. Instead we propose to constrain the conic section to a circle, and give algebraic constraints on the dual conic, that models this manifold. Using these constraints we derive a fast minimal solver based on three image silhouette lines, that can be used to bootstrap robust estimation schemes such as RANSAC. We also present a constrained least squares solver that can incorporate all available image lines for accurate estimation. The algorithms are tested on both synthetic and real data, where they are shown to give accurate results, compared to previous methods.