Vehicle 3D pose tracking using distributed aperture sensors
Taragay Oskiper, Rakesh Kumar, John Fields, Supun Samarasekera · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 2006
In this paper, we present solutions for tracking the 3D pose (location and orientation) of robot or vehicle undergoing general motion (6 degrees of freedom, rotation and translation) based on video streams captured by distributed aperture passive sensor system. A novel algorithm for multi-camera visual odometry is described. Previous published methods for visual odometry have used video streams from 1, 2 or 3 cameras in a monocular binocular or trinocular configurations. In this paper, we present general methods and results for visual odometry for a fixed configuration or known configuration of an arbitrary number of cameras. The images from the different cameras may have no overlap what so ever. The relative pose and configuration of the cameras comprising the distributed aperture system is assumed to be pre-calibrated and known at any time instant. We demonstrate that we can very accurately and robustly track the vehicle pose using the distributed aperture system.