A simple and efficient rectification method for general motion

In this paper a new rectification method is proposed. The method is both simple and efficient and can deal with all possible camera motions. A minimal image size without any pixel loss is guaranteed. The only required information is the oriented fundamental matrix. The whole rectification process is carried out directly in the images. The idea consists of using a polar parametrization of the image around the epipole. The transfer between the images is obtained through the fundamental matrix. The proposed method has important advantages compared to the traditional rectification schemes. In some cases these approaches yield very large images or can not rectify at all. Even the recently proposed cylindrical rectification method can encounter problems in some cases. These problems are mainly due to the fact that the matching ambiguity is not reduced to half epipolar lines. Although this last method is more complex than the one proposed in this paper the resulting images are in general larger. The performance of the new approach is illustrated with some results on real image pairs.