Pose Estimation and Structure Analysis of Image Sequences

Autonomous navigation for ground vehicles has many challenges. Autonomous systems must be able to self-localise, avoid obstacles and determine navigable surfaces. This thesis studies several aspects of autonomous navigation with a particular emphasis on vision, motivated by it being a primary component for navigation in many high-level biological organisms. The key problem of self-localisation or pose estimation can be solved through analysis of the changes in appearance of rigid objects observed from different view points. We therefore describe a system for structure and motion estimation for real-time navigation and obstacle avoidance. With the explicit assumption of a calibrated camera, we have studied several schemes for increasing accuracy and speed of the estimation. The basis of most structure and motion pose estimation algorithms is a good point tracker. However point tracking is computationally expensive and can occupy a large portion of the CPU resources. In this thesis we show how a point tracker can be implemented efficiently on the graphics processor, which results in faster tracking of points and the CPU being available to carry out additional processing tasks. In addition we propose a novel view interpolation approach, that can be used effectively for pose estimation given previously seen views. In this way, a vehicle will be able to estimate its location by interpolating previously seen data. Navigation and obstacle avoidance may be carried out efficiently using structure and motion, but only whitin a limited range from the camera. In order to increase this effective range, additional information needs to be incorporated, more specifically the location of objects in the image. For this, we propose a realtime object recognition method, which uses P-channel matching, which may be used for improving navigation accuracy at distances where structure estimation is unreliable.