A Pose-only Geometric Constraint for Multi-Camera Pose Adjustment
Authors: Shunkun Liang, Banglei Guan, Bin Li, Qifeng Yu, Yang Shang
Abstract
Multi-camera systems offer rich observation capabilities for visual navigation and 3D scene reconstruction; however, the resulting feature redundancy often compromises computational efficiency. This challenge is particularly pronounced during bundle adjustment, where the non-linear optimization of both system poses and scene points incurs substantial computational overhead. To address this challenge, this paper introduces a pose-only geometric constraint for multi-camera systems and proposes a corresponding pose adjustment algorithm. Specifically, we use generalized camera model to establish a unified representation of the multi-camera system. Building upon this model, we formulate the multi-camera pose-only constraint, which implicitly represents a 3D scene point using two base observations and their associated poses, thereby achieving a pose-only representation of the projection geometry. Subsequently, we introduce a multi-camera pose adjustment algorithm that eliminates 3D points from the parameter space, thereby achieving efficient and focused pose optimization. Experimental results on both synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that the proposed algorithm outperforms baseline bundle adjustment methods in computational efficiency, while maintaining or even improving pose estimation accuracy.
Bundle Adjustment (BA) is a cornerstone of 3D computer vision and has benefited from decades of advances in sparse optimization and numerical methods. It was originally developed for jointly optimizing camera intrinsics, poses and sparse 3D points. While extensions incorporate lines and other primitives, integrating richer geometric structures such as parallelism, coplanarity, or wireframes often introduces significantly increased computational cost and reduced numerical stability. In this paper, we propose a unified framework that extends bundle adjustment to jointly optimize geometric features and higher-order relations. We first introduce a taxonomy that distinguishes scalable geometric features with direct 2D measurements (e.g., points and lines), from groups encoding higher-order relations (e.g., coplanarity, parallelism, etc.), where we show that groups can be modeled as camera-like entities within the bundle adjustment framework. Building on this formulation, we propose that both group constraints and cross-feature relations (i.e., point-line associations) can be expressed through 2D reprojection measurements. By formulating group-induced and cross-feature reprojection errors, we preserve the sparsity structure of classical point-based BA under Schur elimination, while avoiding direct 3D regularization that degrades the conditioning and stability. Experiments on both real-world and synthetic datasets demonstrate runtime performance comparable to classical point-only bundle adjustment, while producing significantly richer 3D structures and improved geometric accuracy.
Estimating the relative poses of multi-camera systems is a fundamental problem in computer vision, with critical applications in autonomous vehicles, mobile devices, and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). However, existing solutions often suffer from high computational complexity or rely on an excessive number of point correspondences, limiting their real-world applicability. To address these limitations, we propose two efficient minimal solvers for estimating the relative poses of multi-camera systems using a novel parameterization. The first solver leverages the vertical direction prior provided by Inertial Measurement Units (IMUs), while the second utilizes the rotation axis direction prior from IMUs. Our methods require only four point correspondences and reduce the problem of multi-camera relative pose estimation to solving a univariate 6th-degree polynomial, a significant improvement over existing approaches, which typically involve 8th-degree polynomials. This reduction in computational complexity and correspondence requirements makes our solvers particularly effective when integrated into RANSAC frameworks, demonstrating strong potential for visual odometry applications. Through rigorous evaluations on synthetic data and the KITTI benchmark, our methods achieved superior computational efficiency and competitive accuracy compared to state-of-the-art algorithms.
This paper proposes a fast and online method for jointly performing 3D multi-object tracking and pose estimation using multiple monocular cameras. Our algorithm requires only 2D bounding box and pose detections, eliminating the need for costly 3D training data or computationally expensive deep learning models. Our solution is an efficient implementation of a Bayes-optimal multi-object tracking filter, enhancing computational efficiency while maintaining accuracy. We demonstrate that our algorithm is significantly faster than state-of-the-art methods without compromising accuracy, using only publicly available pre-trained 2D detection models. We also illustrate the robust performance of our algorithm in scenarios where multiple cameras are intermittently disconnected or reconnected during operation.