Absolute Scale in Structure from Motion from a Single Vehicle Mounted Camera by Exploiting Nonholonomic Constraints

In structure-from-motion with a single camera it is well known that the scene can be only recovered up to a scale. In order to compute the absolute scale, one needs to know the baseline of the camera motion or the dimension of at least one element in the scene. In this paper, we show that there exists a class of structure-from-motion problems where it is possible to compute the absolute scale completely automatically without using this knowledge, that is, when the camera is mounted on wheeled vehicles (e.g. cars, bikes, or mobile robots). The construction of these vehicles puts interesting constraints on the camera motion, which are known as “nonholonomic constraints”. The interesting case is when the camera has an offset to the vehicle’s center of motion. We show that by just knowing this offset, the absolute scale can be computed with a good accuracy when the vehicle turns. We give a mathematical derivation and provide experimental results on both simulated and ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: ICCV
• Authors: Davide Scaramuzza, Friedrich Fraundorfer, Marc Pollefeys, Roland Siegwart
• Keywords: Computer Vision, ICCV 2009, Nonholonomic Constraints, Structure From Motion