  This paper derives a novel linear position constraint for cameras seeing a
common scene point, which leads to a direct linear method for global camera
translation estimation. Unlike previous solutions, this method deals with
collinear camera motion and weak image association at the same time. The final
linear formulation does not involve the coordinates of scene points, which
makes it efficient even for large scale data. We solve the linear equation
based on $L_1$ norm, which makes our system more robust to outliers in
essential matrices and feature correspondences. We experiment this method on
both sequentially captured images and unordered Internet images. The
experiments demonstrate its strength in robustness, accuracy, and efficiency.
