Relative Pose Estimation in Binocular Vision for a Planar Scene using
Inter-Image Homographies
Marcus Valtonen
¨
Ornhag and Anders Heyden
Centre for Mathematical Sciences, Lund University, Sweden
Keywords:
Relative Pose Estimation, SLAM, Visual Odometry, Binocular Vision, Planar Motion, Homography.
Abstract:
In this paper we consider a mobile platform with two cameras directed towards the floor mounted the same
distance from the ground, assuming planar motion and constant internal parameters. Earlier work related to
this specific problem geometry has been carried out for monocular systems, and the main contribution of this
paper is the generalization to a binocular system and the recovery of the relative translation and orientation
between the cameras. The method is based on previous work on monocular systems, using sequences of inter-
image homographies. Experiments are conducted using synthetic data, and the results demonstrate a robust
method for determining the relative parameters.
1 INTRODUCTION
In robotics research, it is of interest to accurately track
the position of a mobile robot relative to its surround-
ings. The emergence of artificial intelligence and au-
tonomous vehicles in recent years demand robust al-
gorithms to handle such problems. During the years
of research in the field many kinds of sensors have
been used—LIDAR, rotary encoders, inertial sensors
and GPS, to mention a few—and often in combina-
tion. The type of sensor one chooses to work with re-
stricts what algorithms that can be used, and how the
resulting map of the robot and its surroundings will
look.
One sensor of particular interest for the robotics
and computer vision community is the image sensor
and there are many reasons why it is popular. One
important factor is that the wide range of algorithms
used in computer vision, e.g. visual feature extraction
and pose estimation, can be used in this setting; how-
ever, from an industrial point of view image sensors
are an often considered design choice since they are
relatively cheap compared to other sensors. Further-
more, they are often available on consumer products,
such as smartphones and tablets, where similar tech-
niques can be used, e.g. in Augmented Reality (AR).
With image sensors one is not limited to sparse 3D
clouds of feature points, but can model the map using
dense and textured 3D models.
Visual SLAM systems have been developed for
nearly three decades, with (Harris and Pike, 1988)
being one of the first. Since then, several improve-
ments have been made, and with the aid of modern
computing power, a variety of methods for real-time
SLAM are available. Among the more recent once are
MonoSLAM (Davison et al., 2007), LSD-SLAM (En-
gel et al., 2014) and ORB-SLAM2 (Mur-Artal and
Tard
´
os, 2017), where the latter includes support for
monocular, stereo and RGB-D cameras.
2 RELATED WORK
In epipolar geometry, the fundamental matrix, intro-
duced by (Faugeras, 1992) and (Hartley, 1992), has
been a tool for many algorithms concerning scene
reconstruction; however, planar motion is known to
be ill-conditioned, see e.g. (Hartley and Zisserman,
2004). The problem geometry considered in this pa-
per is forced to planar motion, which is common in
e.g. indoor environments. To overcome this issue
algorithms that take advantage of planar homogra-
phies have been devised, which by construction are
constrained to planar motion and therefore do not
suffer from being ill-conditioned. Some early work
on planar motion using homographies include that
of (Liang and Pears, 2002) and (Hajjdiab and La-
gani
`
ere, 2004). More recent work on ego-motion re-
covery in a monocular system using inter-image ho-
mographies for a planar scene has been covered in
(Wadenb
¨
ack and Heyden, 2013) for a single homogra-
568
Örnhag, M. and Heyden, A.
Relative Pose Estimation in Binocular Vision for a Planar Scene using Inter-Image Homographies.
DOI: 10.5220/0006695305680575
In Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Pattern Recognition Applications and Methods (ICPRAM 2018), pages 568-575
ISBN: 978-989-758-276-9
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