An Alternative Formulation for Five Point Relative Pose Problem

The "Five Point Relative Pose Problem" is to find all possible camera configurations between two calibrated views of a scene given five point-correspondences. We take a fresh look at this well-studied problem with an emphasis on the parametrization of Essential Matrices used by various methods over the years. Using one of these parametrizations, a novel algorithm is proposed, in which the solution to the problem is encoded in a system of nine quadratic equations in six variables, and is reached by formulating this as a constrained optimization problem. We compare our algorithm with an existing 5-point method, and show our formulation to be more robust in the presence of noise.