Object triangulation, 3-D object tracking, feature correspondence, and camera calibration are key problems for estimation from camera networks. This paper addresses these problems within a unified Bayesian framework for joint multi-object tracking and sensor registration. Given that using standard filtering approaches for state estimation from cameras is problematic, an alternative parametrisation is exploited, called disparity space. The disparity space-based approach for triangulation and object tracking is shown to be more effective than non-linear versions of the Kalman filter and particle filtering for non-rectified cameras. The approach for feature correspondence is based on the Probability Hypothesis Density (PHD) filter, and hence inherits the ability to update without explicit measurement association, to initiate new targets, and to discriminate between target and clutter. The PHD filtering approach then forms the basis of a camera calibration method from static or moving objects. Results are shown on simulated data.
In practice, a calibration object is not always available and hence the stratified approach, which relies only on the information extracted from the images, is more appropriate. Projective calibration is usually achieved by structure-from-motion techniques @cite_7 which unrealistically assume perfect knowledge of measurement correspondences as an input to the calibration process. This in turn means that such projective calibration implicitly assumes that the estimated correspondences were updated with the correct measurements and the corresponding points are known in at least a certain number of images. The possibility of incorrect data association or correspondence is not considered as such cases are pruned from the input data and similarly, the possibility of incorrect estimation of the number of correspondences is also not considered. As a consequence, useful information is removed from the input data before the calibration process even begins.
@cite_7
2018296774 109304646 1488694087 1991544872
This paper considers the problem of self-calibration of a camera from an image sequence in the case where the camera's internal parameters (most notably focal length) may change. The problem of camera self-calibration from a sequence of images has proven to be a difficult one in practice, due to the need ultimately to resort to non-linear methods, which have often proven to be unreliable. In a stratified approach to self-calibration, a projective reconstruction is obtained first and this is successively refined first to an affine and then to a Euclidean (or metric) reconstruction. It has been observed that the difficult step is to obtain the affine reconstruction, or equivalently to locate the plane at infinity in the projective coordinate frame. The problem is inherently non-linear and requires iterative methods that risk not finding the optimal solution. The present paper overcomes this difficulty by imposing chirality constraints to limit the search for the plane at infinity to a 3-dimensional cubic region of parameter space. It is then possible to carry out a dense search over this cube in reasonable time. For each hypothesised placement of the plane at infinity, the calibration problem is reduced to one of calibration of a nontranslating camera, for which fast non-iterative algorithms exist. A cost function based on the result of the trial calibration is used to determine the best placement of the plane at infinity. Because of the simplicity of each trial, speeds of over 10,000 trials per second are achieved on a 256 MHz processor. It is shown that this dense search allows one to avoid areas of local minima effectively and find global minima of the cost function. Structure from Motion (SfM) algorithms take as input multi-view stereo images (along with internal calibration information) and yield a 3D point cloud and camera orientations poses in a common 3D coordinate system. In the case of an incremental SfM pipeline, the process requires repeated model estimations based on detected feature points: homography, fundamental and essential matrices, as well as camera poses. These estimations have a crucial impact on the quality of 3D reconstruction. We propose to improve these estimations using the a contrario methodology. While SfM pipelines usually have globally-fixed thresholds for model estimation, the a contrario principle adapts thresholds to the input data and for each model estimation. Our experiments show that adaptive thresholds reach a significantly better precision. Additionally, the user is free from having to guess thresholds or to optimistically rely on default values. There are also cases where a globally-fixed threshold policy, whatever the threshold value is, cannot provide the best accuracy, contrary to an adaptive threshold policy. In this paper we address the problem of uncalibrated structure and motion recovery from image sequences that contain dominant planes in some of the views. Traditional approaches fail when the features common to three consecutive views are all located on a plane. This happens because in the uncalibrated case there is a fundamental ambiguity in relating the structure before and after the plane. This is, however, a situation that is often hard to avoid in man-made environments. We propose a complete approach that detects the problem and defers the computation of parameters that are ambiguous in projective space (i.e. the registration between partial reconstructions only sharing a common plane and poses of cameras only seeing planar features) till after self-calibration. Also a new linear self-calibration algorithm is proposed that couples the intrinsics between multiple subsequences. The final result is a complete metric 3D reconstruction of both structure and motion for the whole sequence. Experimental results on real image sequences show that the approach yields very good results. We propose a non-iterative solution to the PnP problem--the estimation of the pose of a calibrated camera from n 3D-to-2D point correspondences--whose computational complexity grows linearly with n. This is in contrast to state-of-the-art methods that are O(n 5) or even O(n 8), without being more accurate. Our method is applicable for all n?4 and handles properly both planar and non-planar configurations. Our central idea is to express the n 3D points as a weighted sum of four virtual control points. The problem then reduces to estimating the coordinates of these control points in the camera referential, which can be done in O(n) time by expressing these coordinates as weighted sum of the eigenvectors of a 12×12 matrix and solving a small constant number of quadratic equations to pick the right weights. Furthermore, if maximal precision is required, the output of the closed-form solution can be used to initialize a Gauss-Newton scheme, which improves accuracy with negligible amount of additional time. The advantages of our method are demonstrated by thorough testing on both synthetic and real-data.