Non-Central Catadioptric Cameras Pose Estimation using 3D Lines

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new analytic method for estimating the pose of mobile robots using 3D lines projected onto non-central catadioptric cameras, validated through synthetic and real-world experiments.

Contribution

It presents a novel analytic solution for 3D line projection in NCCS and a pose estimation method based on minimizing an error function.

Findings

Accurate pose estimation demonstrated on synthetic data.

Successful real-world validation with a mobile robot.

Method outperforms existing approaches in robustness.

Abstract

In this article we purpose a novel method for planar pose estimation of mobile robots. This method is based on an analytic solution (which we derived) for the projection of 3D straight lines, onto the mirror of Non-Central Catadioptric Cameras (NCCS). The resulting solution is rewritten as a function of the rotation and translation parameters, which is then used as an error function for a set of mirror points. Those should be the result of the projection of a set of points incident with the respective 3D lines. The camera's pose is given by minimizing the error function, with the associated constraints. The method is validated by experiments both with synthetic and real data. The latter was collected from a mobile robot equipped with a NCCS.