Determination of the Pose of an Articulated Object From a Single Perspective View

This paper presents a new method that permits to estimate, in the viewer coordinate system, the spatial attitude of an articulated object from a single perspective image. Its principle is based on the interpretation of some image lines as the perspective projection of linear ridges of the object model, and on an iterative search of the model attitude consistent with these projections. The presented method doesn't locate separately the different parts of the object by using for each of them a technics devoted to the localization of rigid object but computes a global attitude which respects the mechanical articulations of the objet. In fact, the geometrical transformations applied to the model to bring it into the correct attitude are obtained in two steps. The first one is devoted to the estimation of the attitude parameters corresponding to a rotation and involves an iterative process. The second step permits by the resolution of a linear system to estimate the translation parameters. The presented experiments correspond to the localization of robot arms from synthetical and real images. The former case permits to appreciate the accuracy of the method since the final result of the pose estimation can be compared with the attitude parameters used to create the synthetical image. The latter case presents an experiment made in an industrial environment and involves the estimation of twelve paramaters since the observed robot arm owns six inner degrees of freedom. The presented method can be useful in some operation driven by remote control.