Solving the Perspective-2-Point Problem for Flying-Camera Photo Composition

Abstract

Drone-mounted flying cameras will revolutionize photo-taking. The user, instead of holding a camera in hand and manually searching for a viewpoint, will interact directly with image contents in the viewfinder through simple gestures, and the flying camera will achieve the desired viewpoint through the autonomous flying capability of the drone. This work studies the underlying viewpoint search problem for composing a photo with two objects of interest, a common situation in photo-taking. We model it as a Perspective-2-Point (P2P) problem, which is under-constrained to determine the six degrees-of-freedom camera pose uniquely. By incorporating the user's composition requirements and minimizing the camera's flying distance, we form a constrained nonlinear optimization problem and solve it in closed form. Experiments on synthetic data sets and on a real flying camera system indicate promising results.