EPOSIT: An Absolute Pose Estimation Method for Pinhole and Fish-Eye Cameras

TL;DR

EPOSIT is a versatile 6DOF pose estimation method applicable to both pinhole and fish-eye cameras, employing relative 3D point positions and iterative calculations for improved accuracy and stability.

Contribution

It introduces a unified pose estimation approach that generalizes POSIT to fish-eye cameras using a radially symmetric projection model, with a unique solution based on relative 3D points.

Findings

More stable and accurate pose estimates than existing methods

Works for both pinhole and fish-eye cameras

Validated on synthetic and real datasets

Abstract

This paper presents a generic 6DOF camera pose estimation method, which can be used for both the pinhole camera and the fish-eye camera. Different from existing methods, relative positions of 3D points rather than absolute coordinates in the world coordinate system are employed in our method, and it has a unique solution. The application scope of POSIT (Pose from Orthography and Scaling with Iteration) algorithm is generalized to fish-eye cameras by combining with the radially symmetric projection model. The image point relationship between the pinhole camera and the fish-eye camera is derived based on their projection model. The general pose expression which fits for different cameras can be acquired by four noncoplanar object points and their corresponding image points. Accurate estimation results are calculated iteratively. Experimental results on synthetic and real data show that the pose estimation results of our method are more stable and accurate than state-of-the-art methods. The source code is available at https://github.com/k032131/EPOSIT.