Visual odometry from an omnidirectional vision system

Abstract

We describe a method for estimating the translation and rotation between two subsequent poses of a moving robot from images taken with an omnidirectional vision system. This allows some form of visual odometry. We use two sorts of projections derived from the omnidirectional image. The rotation and translation direction are determined from panoramic projections. After that, a projection on a plane parallel to the ground is used to estimate the length of the translation vector. Experiments on real and simulated data are carried out.