Direct Computation of Epipoles Using Two Pairs of Point-Line Correspondences

One of the most important geometric entities of the epipolar geometry is the epipole. Epipoles can be defined as the intersection of the baseline (the line joining the two camera centers) with each of the two image planes in a stereo rig. In order to compute the epipoles in a stereo rig, many of the algorithms in computer vision involve the computation of the fundamental matrix as an intermediate step. In this paper, however, a novel approach for direct computation of epipoles which eliminates the need for computation of the fundamental matrix is proposed. To achieve this goal, four pairs of correspondences (two point-line and two line-point correspondences) will suffice.