Detecting planar homographies in an image pair

Because of their abundance and simplicity, planes are used in several computer vision tasks. Their simplicity results in that, under perspective projection, the transformation between a world plane and its corresponding image plane is projective linear, or a homography. These relations also hold between perspective views of a plane in different images. This paper proposes an algorithm that detects planar homographies in uncalibrated image pairs. It then demonstrates how this plane identification method can be used as a first step in an image analysis process, when point matching between images is unreliable. The detection is performed using a RANSAC scheme based on the linear computation of the homography matrix elements using four points. Results are shown on real image pairs.