Orientation and Pose recovery from Spherical Panoramas

This paper addresses the problem of camera pose recovery from spherical images. The 3D information is extracted from a set of panoramas sparsely distributed over a scene of interest. We present an algorithm to recover the position of omni-directional cameras in a scene using pair-wise essential matrices. First, all rotations with respect to the world frame are found using an incremental bundle adjustment procedure, thus achieving what we called cube alignment. The structure of the scene is then computed using a full bundle adjustment. During this step, the previously computed panorama orientations, used to feed the global optimization process, are further refined. Results are shown for indoor and outdoor panorama sets.