High Accuracy Homography Computation without Iterations

We present highly accurate least-squares (LS) alternatives to the theoretically optimal maximum likelihood (ML) estimator for homographies between two images. Unlike ML, our estimators are non-iterative and yield solutions even in the presence of large noise. By rigorous error analysis, we derive a “hyperaccurate” estimator which is unbiased up to second order noise terms. Then, we introduce a computational simplification, which we call “Taubin approximation”, without incurring a loss in accuracy. We experimentally demonstrate that our estimators have accuracy surpassing the traditional LS estimator and comparable to the ML estimator.