Fast iterative five point relative pose estimation

Robust estimation of the relative pose between two cameras is a fundamental part of Structure and Motion methods. For calibrated cameras, the five point method together with a robust estimator such as RANSAC gives the best result in most cases. The current state-of-the-art method for solving the relative pose problem from five points is due to Nistér [9], because it is faster than other methods and in the RANSAC scheme one can improve precision by increasing the number of iterations. In this paper, we propose a new iterative method, which is based on Powell´s Dog Leg algorithm. The new method has the same precision and is approximately twice as fast as Nister´s algorithm. The proposed method is easily extended to more than five points while retaining a efficient error metrics. This makes it also very suitable as an refinement step. The proposed algorithm is systematically evaluated on three types of datasets with known ground truth.