Conic reconstruction and correspondence from two views

Conics are widely accepted as one of the most fundamental image features together with points and line segments. The problem of space reconstruction and correspondence of two conics from two views is addressed in this paper. It is shown that there are two independent polynomial conditions on the corresponding pair of conics across two views, given the relative orientation of the two views. These two correspondence conditions are derived algebraically and one of them is shown to be fundamental in establishing the correspondences of conics. A unified closed-form solution is also developed for both projective reconstruction of conics in space from two uncalibrated camera views and metric reconstruction from two calibrated camera views. Experiments are conducted to demonstrate the discriminality of the correspondence conditions and the accuracy and stability of the reconstruction both for simulated and real images.