Full 6DOF pose estimation from geo-located images

Abstract

Estimating the external calibration - the pose - of a camera with respect to its environment is a fundamental task in Computer Vision (CV). In this paper, we propose a novel method for estimating the unknown 6DOF pose of a camera with known intrinsic parameters from epipolar geometry only. For a set of geo-located reference images, we assume the camera position - but not the orientation - to be known. We estimate epipolar geometry between the image of the query camera and the individual reference images using image features. Epipolar geometry inherently contains information about the relative positioning of the query camera with respect to each of the reference cameras, giving rise to a set of relative pose estimates. Combining the set of pose estimates and the positions of the reference cameras in a robust manner allows us to estimate a full 6DOF pose for the query camera. We evaluate our algorithm on different datasets of real imagery in indoor and outdoor environments. Since our pose estimation method does not rely on an explicit reconstruction of the scene, our approach exposes several significant advantages over existing algorithms from the area of pose estimation. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.