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We have decided to discontinue the publication of preprints on our preprint server as of 1 March 2024. The publication culture within mathematics has changed so much due to the rise of repositories such as ArXiV (www.arxiv.org) that we are encouraging all institute members to make their preprints available there. An institute's repository in its previous form is, therefore, unnecessary. The preprints published to date will remain available here, but we will not add any new preprints here.

MiS Preprint
38/2022

Average degree of the essential variety

Paul Breiding, Samantha Fairchild, Pierpaola Santarsiero and Elima Shehu

Abstract

The essential variety is an algebraic subvariety of dimension $5$ in real projective space $\mathbb{R}\mathrm{P}^{8}$ which encodes the relative pose of two calibrated pinhole cameras. The $5$-point algorithm in computer vision computes the real points in the intersection of the essential variety with a linear space of codimension $5$. The degree of the essential variety is $10$, so this intersection consists of 10 complex points in general. We compute the expected number of real intersection points when the linear space is random. We focus on two probability distributions for linear spaces. The first distribution is invariant under the action of the orthogonal group $\mathrm{O}(9)$ acting on linear spaces in $\mathbb{R}\mathrm{P}^{8}$. In this case, the expected number of real intersection points is equal to $4$. The second distribution is motivated from computer vision and is defined by choosing 5 point correspondences in the image planes $\mathbb{R}\mathrm{P}^2\times \mathbb{R}\mathrm{P}^2$ uniformly at random. A Monte Carlo computation suggests that with high probability the expected value lies in the interval $(3.95 - 0.05,\ 3.95 + 0.05)$.

Received:
06.12.22
Published:
06.12.22

Related publications

inJournal
2024 Journal Open Access
Paul Breiding, Samantha Fairchild, Pierpaola Santarsiero and Elima Shehu

Average degree of the essential variety

In: La matematica, 3 (2024) 2, pp. 753-776