The Taub Faculty of Computer Science Events and Talks

In this work we revisit the problem of visual odometry. Visual odometry is the process of estimating the motion of the camera by examining the changes that the motion induces on the images made by it. The approach we propose exploits a scene structure typical for that seen by a moving car and is suitable for use in either the stereo or the monocular setting. We recover the rotation and the translation separately, thus dealing with two separate, smaller problems. The rotation is estimated by means of the infinite homography. The rotation estimation algorithm operates on distant image points using the 3-D to partition them into the distant and the near-by ones. We start with an initial estimate and then refine it using an iterative procedure. After the rotation is compensated for, the translation is found by means of the 1-point algorithm in the stereo setting and epipole computation for pure translational motion in the monocular setting.