Rotation Estimation: A Closed-Form Solution Using Spherical Moments

Photometric moments are global descriptors of an image that can be used to recover motion information. This paper uses spherical photometric moments for a closed form estimation of 3D rotations from images. Since the used descriptors are global and not of the geometrical kind, they allow to avoid image processing as features extraction, matching, and tracking. The proposed scheme based on spherical projection can be used for the different vision sensors obeying the central unified model: conventional, fisheye, and catadioptric. Experimental results using both synthetic data and real images in different scenarios are provided to show the efficiency of the proposed method.