Camera Motion from Group Synchronization

This paper deals with the problem of estimating camera motion in the context of structure-from-motion. We describe a pipeline that consumes relative orientations and produces absolute orientations (i.e. camera position and attitude in an absolute reference frame). This pipeline exploits the concept of 'group synchronization' in most of its stages, all of which entail direct solutions such as eigenvalue decompositions or linear least squares. A comprehensive introduction to the group synchronization problem is provided, and the proposed pipeline is evaluated on standard real datasets.