Abstract. This paper theorizes the connection between polarization
and three-view geometry. It presents a ubiquitous polarization-induced
constraint that regulates the relative pose of a system of three cameras.
We demonstrate that, in a multi-view system, the polarization phase
obtained for a surface point is induced from one of the two pencils of
planes: one by specular reflections with its axis aligned with the incident light; one by diffusive reflections with its axis aligned with the surface normal. Differing from the traditional three-view geometry, we show
that this constraint directly encodes camera rotation and projection, and
is independent of camera translation. In theory, six polarized diffusive
point-point-point correspondences suffice to determine the camera rotations. In practise, a cross-validation mechanism using correspondences
of specularites can effectively resolve the ambiguities caused by mixed
polarization. The experiments on real world scenes validate our proposed
theory