1-point-RANSAC structure from motion for vehicle-mounted cameras by exploiting non-holonomic constraints

Abstract

This paper presents a new method to estimate the relative motion of a vehicle from images of a single camera. The computational cost of the algorithm is limited only by the feature extraction and matching process, as the outlier removal and the motion estimation steps take less than a fraction of millisecond with a normal laptop computer. The biggest problem in visual motion estimation is data association; matched points contain many outliers that must be detected and removed for the motion to be accurately estimated. In the last few years, a very established method for removing outliers has been the "5-point RANSAC" algorithm which needs a minimum of 5 point correspondences to estimate the model hypotheses. Because of this, however, it can require up to several hundreds of iterations to find a set of points free of outliers. In this paper, we show that by exploiting the nonholonomic constraints of wheeled vehicles it is possible to use a restrictive motion model which allows us to parameterize the motion with only 1 point correspondence. Using a single feature correspondence for motion estimation is the lowest model parameterization possible and results in the two most efficient algorithms for removing outliers: 1-point RANSAC and histogram voting. To support our method we run many experiments on both synthetic and real data and compare the performance with a state-of-the-art approach. Finally, we show an application of our method to visual odometry by recovering a 3 Km trajectory in a cluttered urban environment and in real-time. © 2011 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC.