Fast and globally convergent Structure and Motion estimation for General Camera Models

This paper presents a novel algorithm to solve the Structure and Motion problem. The novelty is in the use of a general camera model, which does not constrain the algorithm to a specic camera, and the use of the Object Space Error for General Camera Models as cost function. We show that, using this cost function, the structure and the translation part of the motion can be estimated from the rotation part of the motion in closed form. So only the rotation part of the motion needs to be optimized to estimate the minimum of the total cost function. This results in an iterative algorithm which has a theoretical speedup factor of 8 compared to the bundle adjustment method. We also prove the global convergence of the presented algorithm.