Homography-based Egomotion Estimation Using Gravity and SIFT Features
Yaqing Ding (Nanjing University of Science and Technology)*, Daniel Barath (MTA SZTAKI, CMP Prague), Zuzana Kukelova (Czech Technical University in Prague)
Keywords: 3D Computer Vision
                Abstract:
                Camera  systems used, e.g., in cars, UAVs, smartphones, and tablets, are typically  equipped with IMUs (inertial measurement units) that can measure the gravity  vector. Using the information from an IMU, the y-axes of cameras can be  aligned with the gravity, reducing their relative orientation to a single DOF  (degree of freedom). In this paper, we use the gravity information to derive  extremely efficient minimal solvers for homography-based egomotion estimation  from orientation- and scale-covariant features. We use the fact that  orientation- and scale-covariant features, such as SIFT or ORB, provide  additional constraints on the homography. Based on the prior knowledge about  the target plane (horizontal/vertical/general plane, w.r.t. the gravity  direction) and using the SIFT/ORB constraints, we derive new minimal solvers  that require fewer correspondences than traditional approaches and, thus,  speed up the robust estimation procedure significantly. The proposed solvers  are compared with the state-of-the-art point-based solvers on both synthetic  data and real images, showing comparable accuracy and significant improvement  in terms of speed. The implementation of our solvers is available at  https://github.com/yaqding/relativepose-sift-gravity.