Three-dimensional shape recovery using a video camera with a gyro sensor and its error analysis
Toshiharu Mukai, Noboru Ohnishi · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 2001
Image changes produced by a camera motion are an important source of information on the structure of the environment. 3D-shape-recovery from an image sequence has intensively been studied by many researchers and many methods were proposed so far. Theoretically, these methods are perfect, but they are very sensitive to noise, so that, in many practical situations, we could not obtain satisfactory results. The difficulty comes from the fact that, in some cases, the discrimination of small rotation around an axis perpendicular to the optical axis and small translation along the tangent to the rotational motion is difficult. In the present paper, in order to improve the accuracy of recovery, we propose a method for recovering the object shape based on sensor fusion technique. The method uses a video camera and a gyro sensor. The gyro sensor, mounted on the video camera, outputs 3-axial angular velocity. It is used to compensate optical flow information from the video camera. We selected this sensor because it does not require any setting in the environment, so that we can carry it anywhere we want. We have made an experimental system and got fairy good results. We also report a statistical analysis of our method.