Linear N-point camera pose determination

The determination of camera position and orientation from known corresponde nces of 3D reference points and their images is known as pose estimation in computer vision and space resection in photogrammetry. It is well-known th at from three corresponding points there are at most four algebraic solutio ns. Less appears to be known about the cases of four and five corresponding points. In this paper, we propose a family of linear methods that yield a unique solution to 4- and 5-point pose determination for generic reference points. We first review the 3-point algebraic method. Then we present our t wo-step, 4-point and one-step, 5-point linear algorithms. The 5-point metho d can also be extended to handle more than five paints. Finally, we demonst rate our methods on both simulated and real images. We show that they do no t degenerate for coplanar configurations and even outperform the special li near algorithm for coplanar configurations in practice.