Computing rectifying homographies for stereo vision

Image rectification is the process of applying a pair of 2D projective transforms, or homographies, to a pair of images whose epipolar geometry is known so that epipolar lines in the original images map to horizontally aligned lines in the transformed images. We propose a novel technique for image rectification based on geometrically well defined criteria such that image distortion due to rectification is minimized. This is achieved by decomposing each homography into a specialized projective transform, a similarity transform, followed by a shearing transform. The effect of image distortion at each stage is carefully considered.