Revisiting Radial Distortion Absolute Pose

To model radial distortion there are two main approaches; either the image points are undistorted such that they correspond to pinhole projections, or the pinhole projections are distorted such that they align with the image measurements. Depending on the application, either of the two approaches can be more suitable. For example, distortion models are commonly used in Structure-from-Motion since they simplify measuring the reprojection error in images. Surprisingly, all previous minimal solvers for pose estimation with radial distortion use undistortion models. In this paper we aim to fill this gap in the literature by proposing the first minimal solvers which can jointly estimate distortion models together with camera pose. We present a general approach which can handle rational models of arbitrary degree for both distortion and undistortion.