Supporting Structure from Motion with a 3D-Range-Camera

Tracking of a camera pose in all 6 degrees of freedom is a task with many applications in 3D-imaging as i.e. augmentation or robot navigation. Structure from motion is a well known approach for this task, with several well known restrictions. These are namely the scale ambiguity of the calculated relative pose and the need of a certain camera movement (preferably lateral) to initiate the tracking. In the last few years time-of-flight imaging sensors were developed that allow the measuring of metric depth over a whole region with a frame rate similar to a standard CCD-camera. In this work a camera rig consisting of a standard 2D CCD camera and a time-of-flight 3D camera is used. Structure from motion is calculated on the 2D image, aided by the depth measurement from the time-of-flight camera to overcome the restrictions named above. It is shown how the additional 3D-information can be used to improve the accuracy of the camera pose estimation.