Abstract

A novel and efficient image rectification method using the fundamental matrix is proposed. In this approach, camera calibration is not required, and image resampling becomes very simple by using the Bresenham algorithm to extract pixels along the corresponding epipolar line. The rectified images are guaranteed to be effective for all possible camera motions, large or small. The loss of pixel information along the epipolar lines is minimized, and the size of rectified image is much smaller. Furthermore, it never splits the image and the connected regions will stay connected, even if the epipole locates inside an image. The effectiveness of our method is verified by an extensive set of real experiments. It shows that much more accurate matches of feature points can be obtained for a pair of images after the proposed rectification.

Author Keywords: Rectification; Disparity; Epipolar geometry; Binocular stereovision; Uncalibration; Minimal epipolar distortion

Corresponding author. Address: Department of Information Engineering/Image Laboratory 102, Xidian University, Xi’an 710071, Shaanxi Province, China. Tel.: +86-29-8203116; fax: +86-29-8232281

*1 This project was supported by the Chinese National Natural Science Foundation (69972039; 60002007), France-China Advanced Research Program (PRA SI00-04) and Hong Kong RGC grant.