Estimation of rigid body motion using straight line correspondences

An algorithm for the estimation of rigid body motion using straight line correspondences is presented in this paper. In the case of pure translation, we present a linear algorithm using 5 line correspondences over 3 frames. In the case of general motion, it is found that the rotation and the translation parts are separable. The rotation part can be computed by the iterative solution of nonlinear equations based on 6 or more line correspondences over 3 frames. After the rotation is found, the translation part is determined just as in the pure translation case. For the special case of constant rotation, the convergence range of the iterative method is wide enough so that global search can be used to estimate the rotation matrix. However, for the case of variable rotation, global search appears computationally infeasible at present.