Robust and real-time rotation estimation of compound omnidirectional sensor

Abstract

Camera ego-motion consists of translation and rotation, in which rotation can be described simply by distant features. We present a robust rotation estimation using distant features given by our compound omnidirectional sensor. Features are detected by a conventional feature detector, and then distant features are identified by checking the infinity on the omnidirectional image of the compound sensor. The rotation matrix is estimated between consecutive video frames using RANSAC with only distant features. Experiments with various environments show that our approach is robust and also gives reasonable accuracy in real-time.