Scanline Homographies for Rolling-Shutter Plane Absolute Pose

Cameras on portable devices are manufactured with a rolling-shutter (RS) mechanism, where the image rows (aka. scanlines) are read out sequentially. The unknown camera motions during the imaging process cause the so-called RS effects which are solved by motion assumptions in the literature. In this work, we give a solution to the absolute pose problem free of motion assumptions. We categorically demonstrate that the only requirement is motion smoothness instead of stronger constraints on the camera motion. To this end, we propose a novel mathematical abstraction for RS cameras observing a planar scene, called the scanline-homography, a 3 × 2 matrix with 5 DOFs. We establish the relationship between a scanline-homography and the corresponding plane-homography, a 3 × 3 matrix with 6 DOFs assuming the camera is calibrated. We estimate the scanline-homographies of an RS frame using a smooth image warp powered by B-Splines, and recover the plane-homographies afterwards to obtain the scanline-poses based on motion smoothness. We back our claims with various experiments. Code and new datasets: https://bitbucket.org/clermontferrand/planarscanlinehomography/src/master/.