Improved 3D Sparse Maps for High-performance Structure from Motion with Low-cost Omnidirectional Robots

Cavestany, P.; Rodríguez, A.L.; Martínez-Barberá, H.; Breckon, T.P.

Abstract

We consider the use of low-budget omnidirectional platforms for 3D mapping and self-localisation. These robots specifically permit rotational motion in the plane around a central axis, with negligible displacement. In addition, low resolution and compressed imagery, typical of the platform used, results in high level of image noise (_ ∽ 10). We observe highly sparse image feature matches over narrow inter-image baselines. This particular configuration poses a challenge for epipolar geometry extraction and accurate 3D point triangulation, upon which a standard structure from motion formulation is based. We propose a novel technique for both feature filtering and tracking that solves these problems, via a novel approach to the management of feature bundles. Noisy matches are efficiently trimmed, and the scarcity of the remaining image features is adequately overcome, generating densely populated maps of highly accurate and robust 3D image features. The effectiveness of the approach is demonstrated under a variety of scenarios in experiments conducted with low-budget commercial robots.

Citation

Cavestany, P., Rodríguez, A., Rodriguez, A., Martínez-Barberá, H., Martinez-Barbera, H., & Breckon, T. (2015, September). Improved 3D Sparse Maps for High-performance Structure from Motion with Low-cost Omnidirectional Robots. Presented at Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Image Processing, Québec City, Canada

• Presentation Conference Type: Conference Paper (published)
• Conference Name: Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Image Processing
• Publication Date: 2015
• Deposit Date: Oct 4, 2015
• Publicly Available Date: Oct 28, 2015
• Publisher: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
• Pages: 4927-4931
• Book Title: Proc. Int. Conf. on Image Processing
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1109/ICIP.2015.7351744
• Keywords: structure from motion, ill-conditioned baseline configurations, omnidirectional 3D, robot sensing, robot vision, 3D visual sensing, point clouds, robot scene mapping
• Public URL: https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1153486
• Publisher URL: https://breckon.org/toby/publications/papers/cavestany15robot.pdf
• Related Public URLs: http://community.dur.ac.uk/toby.breckon/publications/papers/cavestany15robot.pdf