An Algebraic Approach to Camera Self-Calibration

This paper describes a new self-calibration method for a single camera undergoing general motions. It has the following main contributions. First, we establish new constraints which relate the intrinsic parameters of the camera to the rotational part of the motions. This derivation is purely algebraic. We propose an algorithm which simultaneously solves for camera calibration and the rotational part of motions. Second, we provide a comparison between the developed method and a Kruppa equation-based method. Extensive experiments on both synthetic and real image data show the reliability and outperformance of the proposed method. The practical contribution of the method is its interesting convergence property compared with that of the Kruppa equations method.