Camera network and multi-camera calibration for external parameters is a necessary step for a variety of contexts in computer vision and robotics, ranging from three-dimensional reconstruction to human activity tracking. This paper describes a method for camera network and or multi-camera calibration suitable for specific contexts: the cameras may not all have a common field of view, or if they do, there may be some views that are 180 degrees from one another, and the network may be asynchronous. The calibration object required is one or more planar calibration patterns, rigidly attached to one another, and are distinguishable from one another, such as aruco or charuco patterns. We formulate the camera network and or multi-camera calibration problem in this context using rigidity constraints, represented as a system of equations, and an approximate solution is found through a two-step process. Synthetic and real experiments, including scenarios of a asynchronous camera network and rotating imaging system, demonstrate the method in a variety of settings. Reconstruction accuracy error was less than 0.5 mm for all datasets. This method is suitable for new users to calibrate a camera network, and the modularity of the calibration object also allows for disassembly, shipping, and the use of this method in a variety of large and small spaces.
We present a novel method to fuse the power of deep networks with the computational efficiency of geometric and probabilistic localization algorithms. In contrast to other methods that completely replace a classical visual estimator with a deep network, we propose an approach that uses a convolutional neural network to learn difficult-to-model corrections to the estimator from ground-truth training data. To this end, we derive a novel loss function for learning SE(3) corrections based on a matrix Lie groups approach, with a natural formulation for balancing translation and rotation errors. We use this loss to train a deep pose correction network (DPC-Net) that predicts corrections for a particular estimator, sensor and environment. Using the KITTI odometry dataset, we demonstrate significant improvements to the accuracy of a computationally-efficient sparse stereo visual odometry pipeline, that render it as accurate as a modern computationally-intensive dense estimator. Further, we show how DPC-Net can be used to mitigate the effect of poorly calibrated lens distortion parameters. This paper presents a convolutional neural network based approach for estimating the relative pose between two cameras. The proposed network takes RGB images from both cameras as input and directly produces the relative rotation and translation as output. The system is trained in an end-to-end manner utilising transfer learning from a large scale classification dataset. The introduced approach is compared with widely used local feature based methods (SURF, ORB) and the results indicate a clear improvement over the baseline. In addition, a variant of the proposed architecture containing a spatial pyramid pooling (SPP) layer is evaluated and shown to further improve the performance. Deep learning has shown to be effective for robust and real-time monocular image relocalisation. In particular, PoseNet [22] is a deep convolutional neural network which learns to regress the 6-DOF camera pose from a single image. It learns to localize using high level features and is robust to difficult lighting, motion blur and unknown camera intrinsics, where point based SIFT registration fails. However, it was trained using a naive loss function, with hyper-parameters which require expensive tuning. In this paper, we give the problem a more fundamental theoretical treatment. We explore a number of novel loss functions for learning camera pose which are based on geometry and scene reprojection error. Additionally we show how to automatically learn an optimal weighting to simultaneously regress position and orientation. By leveraging geometry, we demonstrate that our technique significantly improves PoseNets performance across datasets ranging from indoor rooms to a small city.