Reduced egomotion estimation drift using omnidirectional views

Abstract

Estimation of camera motion from a given image sequence is a common task for multi-view 3D computer vision applications. Salient features (lines, corners etc.) in the images are used to estimate the motion of the camera, also called egomotion. This estimation suffers from an error built-up as the length of the image sequence increases and this causes a drift in the estimated position. In this letter, this phenomenon is demonstrated and an approach to improve the estimation accuracy is proposed. The main idea of the proposed method is using an omnidirectional camera (360° horizontal field of view) in addition to a conventional (perspective) camera. Taking advantage of the correspondences between the omnidirectional and perspective images, the accuracy of camera position estimates can be improved. In our work, we adopt the sequential structure-from-motion approach which starts with estimating the motion between first two views and more views are added one by one. We automatically match points between omnidirectional and perspective views. Point correspondences are used for the estimation of epipolar geometry, followed by the reconstruction of 3D points with iterative linear triangulation. In addition, we calibrate our cameras using sphere camera model which covers both omnidirectional and perspective cameras. This enables us to treat the cameras in the same way at any step of structure-from-motion. We performed simulated and real image experiments to compare the estimation accuracy when only perspective views are used and when an omnidirectional view is added. Results show that the proposed idea of adding omnidirectional views reduces the drift in egomotion estimation.