Epipolar Rectification Based on Singular Value Decomposition of Camera Translation Matrix

Epipolar rectification is a projection transformation method for the original image pair of a binocular camera such that the corresponding polar lines of the corrected image are on the same horizontal line, no vertical parallax occurs, and stereo-matching is optimized as a one-dimensional search problem. A polar correction method based on a binocular camera translation matrix is proposed to address the shortcomings of current polar correction methods. First, the new corrected rotation matrix is derived using the translation matrix of singular value decomposition. Second, a new camera internal reference matrix is established based on the image relationship before and after correction to complete the polar correction. The proposed method was used to verify multiple groups of binocular images in different scenes in the SYNTIM database. The experimental results show that the average correction error is within 0.6 pixels. The image produces minimal distortion, and the average deviation is approximately 2.4°. The average operation time is 0.2302 s. With its application value, this method fully satisfies polar correction requirements, solves the error, and improves the tedious calculation process caused by the mechanical deviation of the camera during the stereo matching of binocular cameras.