Abstract We present a robust method which compensates RS distortions in a single image using a set of image curves, basing on the knowledge that they correspond to 3D straight lines. Unlike in existing work, no a priori knowledge about the line directions (e.g. Manhattan World assumption) is required. We fifirst formulate a parametric equation for the projection of a 3D straight line viewed by a moving rolling shutter camera under a uniform motion model. Then we propose a method which effificiently estimates ego angular velocity separately from pose parameters, using at least 4 image curves. Moreover, we propose for the fifirst time a RANSAC-like strategy to select image curves which really correspond to 3D straight lines and reject those corresponding to actual curves in 3D world. A comparative experimental study with both synthetic and real data from famous benchmarks shows that the proposed method outperforms all the existing techniques from the state-of-theart