Abstract

The vast majority of modern consumer-grade camerasemploy a rolling shutter mechanism. In dynamic geomet-ric computer vision applications such as visual SLAM, theso-called rolling shutter effect therefore needs to be prop-erly taken into account. A dedicated relative pose solver appears to be the first problem to solve, as it is of eminentimportance to bootstrap any derivation of multi-view ge-ometry. However, despite its significance, it has receivedinadequate attention to date. This paper presents a detailed investigation of the ge-ometry of the rolling shutter relative pose problem. We in-troduce the rolling shutter essential matrix, and establish its link to existing models such as the push-broom cameras, summarized in a clean hierarchy of multi-perspective cameras. The generalization of well-established concepts from epipolar geometry is completed by a definition of the Sampson distance in the rolling shutter case. The work is concluded with a careful investigation of the introduced epipolar geometry for rolling shutter cameras on several dedi-cated benchmarks.