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Homography-based camera pose estimation with known gravity direction for UAV navigation

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Abstract

Relative pose estimation has become a fundamental and important problem in visual simultaneous localization and mapping. This paper statistically optimizes the solution for the homography-based relative pose estimation problem. Assuming a known gravity direction and a dominant ground plane, the homography representation in the normalized image plane enables a least squares pose estimation between two views. Furthermore, an iterative estimation method of the camera trajectory is developed for visual odometry. The accuracy and robustness of the proposed algorithm are experimentally tested on synthetic and real data in indoor and outdoor environments. Various metrics confirm the effectiveness of the proposed method in practical applications.

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Acknowledgements

This work was partially supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 61603303, 61803309, 61703343), Natural Science Foundation of Shaanxi Province (Grant No. 2018JQ6070), China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (Grant No. 2018M633574), and Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (Grant Nos. 3102019ZDHKY02, 3102018JCC003).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Automation, Northwestern Polytechnical University, Xi’an, 710072, China

    Chunhui Zhao, Jinwen Hu & Quan Pan

  2. School of Electronic Information, Northwestern Polytechnical University, Xi’an, 710072, China

    Bin Fan & Zhao Xu

Authors
  1. Chunhui Zhao
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  2. Bin Fan
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  3. Jinwen Hu
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  4. Quan Pan
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  5. Zhao Xu
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Correspondence to Jinwen Hu.

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Zhao, C., Fan, B., Hu, J. et al. Homography-based camera pose estimation with known gravity direction for UAV navigation. Sci. China Inf. Sci. 64, 112204 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11432-019-2690-0

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11432-019-2690-0

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