The paracatadioptric camera is one of the most popular panoramic systems currently available in the market. It provides a wide field of view by combining a parabolic shaped mirror with a camera inducing an orthographic projection. Previous work proved that the paracatadioptric projection of a line is a conic curve, and that the sensor can be fully calibrated from the image of three or more lines. However, the estimation of the conic curves where the lines are projected is hard to accomplish because of the partial occlusion. In general only a small arc of the conic is visible in the image, and conventional conic fitting techniques are unable to accurately estimate the curve. The present work provides methods to overcome this problem. We show that in uncalibrated paracatadioptric views a set of conic curves is a set of line projections if and only if certain properties are verified. These properties are used to constrain the search space and correctly estimate the curves. The conic fitt...
João P. Barreto, Helder Araújo