I do have two sets of points and I want to find the best transformation between them.
In OpenCV, you have the following function:
Mat H = Calib3d.findHomography(src_points, dest_points);
that returns you a 3x3 Homography matrix, using RANSAC. My problem is now, that I only need translation and rotation (& maybe scale), I don't need affine and perspective.
The thing is, my points are only in 2D.
(1) Is there a function to compute something like a homography but with less degrees of freedom?
(2) If there is none, is it possible to extract a 3x3 matrix that does only translation and rotation from the 3x3 homography matrix?
Thanks in advance for any help!
Isa
OpenCV estimateRigidTransform function is exactly what you need: it returns Translation, Rotation and Scale (use false value for fullAffine flag). And it DOES use RANSAC (see source code to be sure of it).
Homography is for 2D points, the third dimension is just for casting points in 3 dim homogeneous coordinates and performing perspective effects. You can always cast points back:
homogeneous [x, y, w]
cartesian [x/w, y/w]
However since you calculate 6DOF instead of 4DOF (similarity) you result is pretty different from what you expect with 4DOF. More flexible transformation will fit more points in RANSAC at the expense of distortions in transformations you care about. Bottom line - don’t try to decompose H, instead fit similarity or isometry (also called rigid or euclidean). The reason why they are absent in the library - they are expressed in closed form even with correct least squared metric in point coordinates and thus don't require non-linear optimization. In other words, they are very simple.
If you only have rotation and translation, I wrote a quick functions to find them (no RANSAC though). It is probably similar to a rigidTransform but more understandable (hopefully)
https://stackoverflow.com/a/18091472/457687
With scale there is still a closed form solution, but slightly different formulas for translation and scaling. See Learning similarity parameters, p. 25
Related
I want to know about why do we normalize the homography or fundamental matrix? Here is the code in particular.
H = H * (1.0 / H[2, 2]) # Normalization step. H is [3, 3] matrix.
I can understand that we have to normalize the data before computing SVD because of instability caused by linear least squares but why do we normalize it in end?
A homography in 3D space has 8 degrees of freedom by definition, mapping from one plane to another using perspective. Such a homography can be defined by giving four points, which makes eight coordinates (scalars).
A 3x3 matrix has 9 elements, so it has 9 degrees of freedom. That is one degree more than needed for a homography.
The homography doesn't change when the matrix is scaled (multiplied by a scalar). All the math works the same. You don't need to normalize your homography matrix.
It is a good idea to normalize.
For one, it makes the arithmetic somewhat tamer. Have some wikipedia links to fields of study because weaving all these into a coherent sentence... doesn't add anything:
Numerical analysis, Condition number, Floating-point arithmetic, Numerical error, Numerical stability, ...
Also, normalization makes the matrix easier for humans to interpret. The most common normalization is to scale the matrix such that the last element becomes 1. That is convenient because this whole math happens in a projective space, where the projection causes points to be mapped to the w=1 plane, making vectors have a 1 for the last element.
How is the homography matrix provided to you?
For example, in the scene that some library function calculates and provides the homography matrix to you,
if the function specification doesn't mention about the scale...
In an extreme case, the function can be implemented as:
Matrix3x3 CalculateHomographyMatrix( some arguments )
{
Matrix3x3 H = ...; //Homogoraphy Calculation
return Non_Zero_Random_Value * H; //Wow!
}
Element values may become very large or very small and using such values to your process may cause problems (floating point computation errors).
I am have been using solvepnp() for the calculation of the rotation and translation matrix. But the euler angles calculated from the obtained rotation matrix gave very erratic values. Trying to find the problem, I had a set of 2D projection points for my marker and kept the other parameters of solvepnp() constant.
Eg values:
2D points
[219.67473, 242.78395; 363.4151, 238.61298; 503.04855, 234.56117; 501.70917, 628.16742; 500.58069, 959.78564; 383.1756, 972.02679; 262.8746, 984.56982; 243.17044, 646.22925]
The euler angle theta(x) calculated from the output rotation matrix of solvepnp() was -26.4877
Next, I incremented only the x value of the first point(i.e 219.67473) by 0.1 to check the variation of the theta(x) euler angle (keeping the remaining points and the other parameters constant) and ran the solvepnp() again .For that very small change,I had values which were decreasing from -19 degree, -18 degree (for x coord = 223.074) then suddenly jump to 27 degree for a while (for x coord = 223.174 to 226.974) then come down to 1.3 degree (for x coord = 227.074).
I cannot understand this behaviour at all.Could somebody please explain?
My euler angle calculation from the rotation matrix uses this procedure.
Try Rodrigues() for conversion between rotation matrix and rotation vector to make sure everything is clean and right. Non RANSAC version can be very sensitive to outliers that create a huge error in the parameters and thus bias a solution. Using RANSAC version of solvePnP may make it more stable to outliers. For example, adding too much to one of the points coordinates will eventually make it an outlier and it won’t influence a solution after that.
If everything fails, write a series unit tests: create an artificial set of points in 3D (possibly non planar), apply a simple translation first, in second variant apply rotation only, and in a third test apply both. Project using your camera matrix and then plug in your 2D, 3D points and projection matrix into your code to find the pose. If the result deviates from the inverse of the translations and rotations your applied to the points look for the bug in feeding parameters to PnP.
It seems the coordinate systems are different.OpenCV uses right-hand coordinate-system Y-pointing downwards. At nghiaho.com it says the calculations are based on this and if you look at the axis they don't seem to match. I guess you are using Rodrigues for matrix computation? Try comparing rotation vectors as well.
at first I want to apologize for my bad English.
I am really new in OpenCV and in virtual reality. I tried to find out the theory of image processing, but some points are missing there for me. I learned that projection matrix is matrix to transform 3D point to 2D. Am I right? Essential matrix gives me information about rotation between two cameras and fundamental matrix gives information about the relationship between pixel in one image with pixel in other image. The homography matrix relates coordinates of pixel in two image (is that correct?).
What is the difference between fundamental and homography matrix?
Do I need all these matrices to get projection matrix?
I am new in these, so please if you can, try to explain me it simply.
Thanks for your help.
I learned that projection matrix is matrix to transform 3D point to 2D. Am I right?
Yes. But usually these transformations are expressed in homogeneous coordinates. This means that 3D points are represented by 4-vectors (ie vectors of length 4), and 2D points are represented by 3-vectors.
The homography matrix relates coordinates of pixel in two image (is that correct?)
No. This is true in two special cases only: when the scene lie on a plane, or when the two views have been generated by two cameras sharing the same center location.
In all the other cases, ie when the scene is not planar and the two cameras have different centers, there is not an homography transforming one image into the other.
What is the difference between fundamental and homography matrix?
There are many differences. From an algebraic point of view, the most obvious difference is that an homography matrix is non-singular (its rank is 3), while a fundamental matrix is singular (its rank is 2).
As a result to a call to findHomography() I get back a 3x3 matrix mtx[3][3]. This matrix contains the translation part in mtx[0][2] and mtx[1][2]. But how can I get the rotation part out of this 3x3 matrix?
Unfortunaltely my target system uses completely different calculation so I can't reuse the 3x3 matrix directly and have to extract the rotation out of this, that's why I'm asking this question.
Generally speaking, you can't decompose the final transformation matrix into its constituent parts. There are some certain cases where it is possible. For example if the only operation preceding the operation was a translation, then you can do arccos(m[0][0]) to get the theta value of the rotation.
Found it for my own meanwhile: There is an OpenCV function RQDecomp3x3() that can be used to extract parts of the transformation out of a matrix.
RQDecomp3x3 has a problem to return rotation in other axes except Z so in this way you just find spin in z axes correctly,if you find projection matrix and pass it to "decomposeProjectionMatrix" you will find better resaults,projection matrix is different to homography matrix you should attention to this point.
With FeatureDetector I get features on two images with the same element and match this features with BruteForceMatcher.
Then I'm using OpenCv function findHomography to get homography matrix
H = findHomography( src2Dfeatures, dst2Dfeatures, outlierMask, RANSAC, 3);
and getting H matrix, then align image with
warpPerspective(img1,alignedSrcImage,H,img2.size(),INTER_LINEAR,BORDER_CONSTANT);
I need to know rotation angle, scale, displacement of detected element. Is there any simple way to get this than some big equations? Some evaluated formulas just to put data in?
Homography would match projections of your elements lying on a plane or lying arbitrary in 3D if the camera goes through a pure rotation or zoom and no translation. So here are the cases we are talking about with indication of what is the input to our calculations:
- planar target, pure rotation, intra-frame homography
- planar target, rotation and translation, target to frame homography
- 3D target, pure rotation, frame to frame mapping (constrained by a fundamental matrix)
In case of the planar target, a pure rotation is easy to calculate through your frame-to-frame Homography (H12):
given intrinsic camera matrix A, plane to image homographies for frame H1, and H2 that can be expressed as H1=A, H2=A*R, H12 = H2*H1-1=ARA-1 and thus R=A-1H12*A
In case of elements lying on a plane, rotation with translation of the camera (up to unknown scale) can be calculated through decomposition of target-to-frame homography. Note that the target can be just one of the views. Assuming you have your original planar target as an image (taken at some reference orientation) your task is to decompose the homography between images H12 which can be done through SVD. The first two columns of H represent the first two columns of the rotation martrix and be be recovered through H=ULVT, [r1 r2] = UDVT where D is 3x2 Identity matrix with the last row being all 0. The third column of a rotation matrix is just a vector product of the first two columns. The last column of the Homography is a translation vector times some constant.
Finally for arbitrary configuration of points in 3D and pure camera rotation, the rotation is calculated using the essential matrix decomposition rather than homography, see this
cv::decomposeProjectionMatrix();
and
cv::RQDecomp3x3();
are both similar to what you want to achive.
None of them is perfect. The theory behind them and why you cannot extract all params from a 3x3 matrix is a bit cumbersome. But the short answer is that a 3x3 proj matrix is a simplification from the complete 4x4 one, based on the fact that all points stay in the same plane.
You can try to use levenberg marquardt optimalization, where parameters will be translation and rotation, equations will represent by computed distances between features from two images(use only inliers from ransac homography).
Here is C++ implementation of LM http://www.ics.forth.gr/~lourakis/levmar/