Virtual-point-based Solutions to Handle Generalized Absolute Pose Problem

Abstract

Multi-camera systems are increasingly adopted in robotics and autonomous navigation for their wide field of view, flexibility, and fault tolerance. Nevertheless, existing PnP solvers fail to handle multiple projection centers. This paper introduces a virtual point formulation that bridges the standard PnP and generalized pose problems, enabling a unified pipeline that transforms existing PnP solvers into generalized pose solvers. Based on this framework, we derive three Virtual-point-based Generalized Pose solvers, namely VGPc, VGPq, and VGPr, leveraging Cayley, quaternion, and rotation-matrix parameterizations, respectively. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed solvers inherit the accuracy and efficiency of original PnP algorithms while significantly outperforming existing generalized solvers. Specifically, VGPc achieves higher estimation accuracy under heteroscedastic noise conditions, VGPq maintains global optimality, whereas VGPr provides superior computational efficiency without accuracy degradation.