Uncalibrated reconstruction of curved surfaces

In this article, we show that even if the camera is uncalibrated and its tr anslational motion is unknown, curved surfaces can be reconstructed from th eir apparent contours up to a 3D affine ambiguity. Further, we show that ev en if the reconstruction is non-metric (non-Euclidean), we can still extrac t useful information from the reconstruction for many computer vision appli cations, such as distinguishing curved surfaces from fixed features and com puting the time-to-contact to the curved surfaces. (C) 1999 Published by El sevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.