Wide-Area Egomotion Estimation from Known 3D Structure

Abstract

Robust egomotion recovery for extended camera excursions has long been a challenge for machine vision researchers. Existing algorithms handle spatially limited environments and tend to consume prohibitive computational resources with increasing excursion time and distance. We describe an egomotion estimation algorithm that takes as input a coarse 3D model of an environment, and an omnidirectional video sequence captured within the environment, and produces as output a reconstruction of the camera's 6-DOF egomotion expressed in the coordinates of the input model. The principal novelty of our method is a robust matching algorithm that associates 2D edges from the video with 3D line segments from the input model. Our system handles 3-DOF and 6-DOF camera excursions of hundreds of meters within real, cluttered environments. It uses a novel prior visibility analysis to speed initialization and dramatically accelerate image-to-model matching. We demonstrate the method's operation, and qualitatively and quantitatively evaluate its performance, on both synthetic and real image sequences.