Extension of epipolar image analysis to circular camera movements

Epipolar image analysis is a robust method for 3D scene depth reconstruction that uses all available views of an image sequence simultaneously. It is restricted to horizontal, linear, and equidistant camera movements. In this paper, we present a concept for an extension of epipolar image analysis to other camera configurations like, e.g., circular movements. Instead of searching for straight lines in the epipolar image, we explicitly compute the trajectories of particular points through the image cube. Variation of the unknown depth leads to different curves. From those, the one corresponding to the true depth is selected by evaluating color constancy along the curve. In order to handle occlusions correctly an explicit occlusion compatible ordering scheme is derived for the case of circular movements. To compensate the influence of perspective projection we introduce a depth corrected epipolar image analysis algorithm which we call image cube trajectory analysis (ICT).