This is essentially a homography recovery problem. What you are doing is given co-ordinates in one image and the corresponding co-ordinates in the other image, you are trying to recover the combined translation and rotation matrix that was used to warp the points from the one image to the other.
You can essentially combine the rotation and translation into a single matrix by multiplying the two matrices together. Multiplying is simply compositing the two operations together. You would this get:
H = [cos(theta) -sin(theta) tx]
[sin(theta) cos(theta) ty]
[ 0 0 1]
The idea behind this is to find the parameters by minimizing the error through least squares between each pair of points.
Basically, what you want to find is the following relationship:
xi_after = H*xi_before
H is the combined rotation and translation matrix required to map the co-ordinates from the one image to the other. H is also a 3 x 3 matrix, and knowing that the lower right entry (row 3, column 3) is 1, it makes things easier. Also, assuming that your points are in the augmented co-ordinate system, we essentially want to find this relationship for each pair of co-ordinates from the first image (x_i, y_i) to the other (x_i', y_i'):
[p_i*x_i'] [h11 h12 h13] [x_i]
[p_i*y_i'] = [h21 h22 h23] * [y_i]
[ p_i ] [h31 h32 1 ] [ 1 ]
The scale of p_i is to account for homography scaling and vanishing points. Let's perform a matrix-vector multiplication of this equation. We can ignore the 3rd element as it isn't useful to us (for now):
p_i*x_i' = h11*x_i + h12*y_i + h13
p_i*y_i' = h21*x_i + h22*y_i + h23
Now let's take a look at the 3rd element. We know that p_i = h31*x_i + h32*y_i + 1. As such, substituting p_i into each of the equations, and rearranging to solve for x_i' and y_i', we thus get:
x_i' = h11*x_i + h12*y_i + h13 - h31*x_i*x_i' - h32*y_i*x_i'
y_i' = h21*x_i + h22*y_i + h23 - h31*x_i*y_i' - h32*y_i*y_i'
What you have here now are two equations for each unique pair of points. What we can do now is build an over-determined system of equations. Take each pair and build two equations out of them. You will then put it into matrix form, i.e.:
Ah = b
A would be a matrix of coefficients that were built from each set of equations using the co-ordinates from the first image, b would be each pair of points for the second image and h would be the parameters you are solving for. Ultimately, you are finally solving this linear system of equations reformulated in matrix form:
You would solve for the vector h which can be performed through least squares. In MATLAB, you can do this via:
h = A b;
A sidenote for you: If the movement between images is truly just a rotation and translation, then h31 and h32 will both be zero after we solve for the parameters. However, I always like to be thorough and so I will solve for h31 and h32 anyway.
NB: This method will only work if you have at least 4 unique pairs of points. Because there are 8 parameters to solve for, and there are 2 equations per point, A must have at least a rank of 8 in order for the system to be consistent (if you want to throw in some linear algebra terminology in the loop). You will not be able to solve this problem if you have less than 4 points.
If you want some MATLAB code, let's assume that your points are stored in sourcePoints and targetPoints. sourcePoints are from the first image and targetPoints are for the second image. Obviously, there should be the same number of points between both images. It is assumed that both sourcePoints and targetPoints are stored as M x 2 matrices. The first columns contain your x co-ordinates while the second columns contain your y co-ordinates.
numPoints = size(sourcePoints, 1);
%// Cast data to double to be sure
sourcePoints = double(sourcePoints);
targetPoints = double(targetPoints);
%//Extract relevant data
xSource = sourcePoints(:,1);
ySource = sourcePoints(:,2);
xTarget = targetPoints(:,1);
yTarget = targetPoints(:,2);
%//Create helper vectors
vec0 = zeros(numPoints, 1);
vec1 = ones(numPoints, 1);
xSourcexTarget = -xSource.*xTarget;
ySourcexTarget = -ySource.*xTarget;
xSourceyTarget = -xSource.*yTarget;
ySourceyTarget = -ySource.*yTarget;
%//Build matrix
A = [xSource ySource vec1 vec0 vec0 vec0 xSourcexTarget ySourcexTarget; ...
vec0 vec0 vec0 xSource ySource vec1 xSourceyTarget ySourceyTarget];
%//Build RHS vector
b = [xTarget; yTarget];
%//Solve homography by least squares
h = A b;
%// Reshape to a 3 x 3 matrix (optional)
%// Must transpose as reshape is performed
%// in column major format
h(9) = 1; %// Add in that h33 is 1 before we reshape
hmatrix = reshape(h, 3, 3)';
Once you are finished, you have a combined rotation and translation matrix. If you want the x and y translations, simply pick off column 3, rows 1 and 2 in hmatrix. However, we can also work with the vector of h itself, and so h13 would be element 3, and h23 would be element number 6. If you want the angle of rotation, simply take the appropriate inverse trigonometric function to rows 1, 2 and columns 1, 2. For the h vector, this would be elements 1, 2, 4 and 5. There will be a bit of inconsistency depending on which elements you choose as this was solved by least squares. One way to get a good overall angle would perhaps be to find the angles of all 4 elements then do some sort of average. Either way, this is a good starting point.
References
I learned about homography a while ago through Leow Wee Kheng's Computer Vision course. What I have told you is based on his slides: http://www.comp.nus.edu.sg/~cs4243/lecture/camera.pdf. Take a look at slides 30-32 if you want to know where I pulled this material from. However, the MATLAB code I wrote myself :)
