Estimating Velocity and Spin of Spherical Objects from Rolling-Shutter Image(s)
Authors: Wenjie Xue, Jun Yang, Jingmin Wang, Limin Shang
Organizations: Epson Canada Ltd, Toronto, ON L3R 6G3, Canada · University of Toronto, Toronto, ON M5S 1A1, Canada
Abstract
Rolling-shutter cameras introduce characteristic distortions when imaging fast moving objects, and these effects are typically treated as artifacts to be corrected. In this work, we instead leverage rolling-shutter distortions as a valuable source of temporal information to estimate the 3D translational and angular velocities of rapidly moving spherical objects from a single rolling-shutter frame. We design a robust and easily detectable spherical pattern and propose a correspondence-free formulation that recovers motion by enforcing geometric consistency in a back-projection framework. By exploiting the geometry of the sphere, translational and rotational motions are decoupled and estimated through a two-stage optimization process, enabling reliable velocity recovery even for textureless objects. Extensive experiments on both synthetic and real datasets demonstrate accurate and robust estimation of motion parameters under challenging high-speed conditions.
Rolling shutter (RS) cameras equip virtually all consumer devices, yet RS-aware relative pose estimation has remained impractical: the state-of-the-art solver requires a minimum of 20 point correspondences, making RANSAC-based robust estimation prohibitively expensive due to the exponential dependence of the iteration count on the sample size. We make RS relative pose estimation practical by introducing affine correspondences (ACs) into the RS two-view geometry. We derive novel \emph{RS-corrected affine constraints} that account for the coupling between point perturbations and the row-dependent essential matrix, providing two equations per correspondence beyond the standard epipolar constraint. Building on these constraints, we develop a linearized algebraic solver that estimates pose and RS motion from only 7 ACs. The solver exploits the physical smallness of RS parameters to linearize the constraints, eliminates the 12 RS unknowns via null-space projection, and solves the remaining degree-20 system via action matrices in 1.2,ms. On the TUM RS benchmark, our method achieves the best pose and RS parameter accuracy among all tested methods and, uniquely among RS solvers, provides accurate translational velocity estimates -- which are poorly conditioned from point correspondences alone due to a v-t coupling. On the global-shutter EuRoC MAV dataset, the solver achieves comparable accuracy to the standard 5-point algorithm, demonstrating that it generalizes well to the GS setting. Code is at https://github.com/danini/rolling_shutter_made_practical.
Rolling shutter (RS) cameras are widely used in consumer devices, but their row-wise exposure causes distortions under motion, making geometric 3D vision problems dependent on both camera intrinsics and readout time ratio. Existing RS calibration methods rely on calibration targets or specialised hardware, limiting their use in unconstrained settings. We present the first self-calibration method for RS cameras that directly estimates camera intrinsics and the readout time ratio from image sequences, without requiring calibration targets. The method is implemented as a self-calibrating bundle adjustment (BA), which critically depends on the RS imaging model. We combine two known complementary models. The first formulates RS imaging as continuous-time trajectory estimation under a row-wise pose representation. The second interprets RS images as temporally distorted global shutter (GS) images and requires to estimate correction fields. The combination is non-trivial and results in a unified dual-projection model, in which each 3D point is simultaneously constrained at both row-dependent and reference timestamps along a shared continuous trajectory, enforcing stronger geometric and temporal consistency. Extensive simulations analyse the applicability of several implementations under varying conditions, and real data experiments demonstrate the accuracy, robustness, and practical effectiveness of the proposed approach.
Motion degradation, manifested as blur in global shutter (GS) images or rolling shutter (RS) distortion in RS counterparts, remains a fundamental challenge in computational imaging, especially under fast motion or low-light conditions. While prior works have treated blur decomposition and RS temporal super-resolution as separate tasks, this separation fails to exploit their intrinsic complementarity. In this paper, we propose a unified framework to invert motion degradation and reenact imaging moment by jointly leveraging the complementary characteristics of GS blur and RS distortion. To this end, we introduce a novel dual-shutter setup that captures synchronized blur-RS image pairs and demonstrate that this combination effectively resolves temporal and spatial ambiguities inherent in both modalities. For allowing flexible performance-cost trade-offs, we further extend this dual-shutter setup to a stereo Blur-RS configuration with a narrow baseline. In addition, we construct a triaxial imaging system to collect a real-world dataset with aligned GS-RS pairs and ground-truth high-speed frames, enabling robust training and evaluation beyond synthetic data. Our proposed network explicitly disentangles motion into context-aware and temporally-sensitive representations via a dual-stream motion interpretation module, followed by a self-prompted frame reconstruction stage. Extensive experiments validate the superiority and generalizability of our approach, establishing a new paradigm for realistic high-speed video reconstruction under complex motion degradations. Codes and more resources are available at https://jixiang2016.github.io/dualBR_site/.