Patent ID: 7324686

Claim:
A method for reconstructing a Euclidean 3-dimensional scene from a number of uncalibrated 2-dimensional images of the scene, said method comprising the steps of: establishing a first projective scene reconstruction based on image correspondences between the uncalibrated images: transforming the first projective scene reconstruction into a second projective scene reconstruction that is explicitly enforced to be quasi-affine only with respect to camera projection centers and a fractional subset of the scene points of the first projective scene reconstruction; and transforming the second projective scene reconstruction into a Euclidean scene reconstruction, wherein said step of transforming the first projective scene reconstruction into a second projective scene reconstruction includes the steps of: establishing a number of constraints on the position of the plane at infinity based on a voting procedure in which the cheirality of a plurality of scene points with respect to camera projection centers is considered; and determining a transformation for transforming said first projective scene reconstruction into said second projective scene reconstruction based on the established constraints.