Distributed pose estimation from multiple views

Abstract

A method is introduced to track the object's motion and estimate its pose from multiple cameras. We focus on direct estimation of the 3D pose from 2D image sequences. We derive a distributed solution that is equivalent to the centralized pose estimation from multiple cameras. Moreover, we show that, by using a proper rotation between each camera and a fixed camera view, we can rely on independent pose estimation from each camera. Then, we propose a robust solution to the centralized pose estimation problem by deriving a best linear unbiased estimate from the rotated pose estimates obtained from each camera. The resulting pose estimation is therefore robust to errors obtained from specific camera views. Moreover, the computational complexity of the distributed solution is efficient and grows linearly with the number of camera views. Finally, the computer simulation experiments demonstrate that our algorithm is fast and accurate.