Planar Motion Bundle Adjustment

Abstract

In this paper we consider trajectory recovery for two cameras directed towards the floor, and which are mounted rigidly on a mobile platform. Previous work for this specific problem geometry has focused on locally minimising an algebraic error between inter-image homographies to estimate the relative pose. In or[1]der to accurately track the platform globally it is necessary to refine the estimation of the camera poses and 3D locations of the feature points, which is commonly done by utilising bundle adjustment; however, existing software packages providing such methods do not take the specific problem geometry into account, and the result is a physically inconsistent solution. We develop a bundle adjustment algorithm which incorporates the planar motion constraint, and devise a scheme that utilises the sparse structure of the problem. Experiments are carried out on real data and the proposed algorithm shows an improvement compared to established generic methods.