Environmental Map Generation and Egomotion Estimation Using an Omnidirectional Image Sensor

Abstract

Generation of a stationary environmental map is one of the important tasks for computer vision. Under the assumption of known motion of a camera, environmental maps of a real scene can be successfully generated by monitoring azimuth changes in an image. Several researchers have used this property for robot navigation. However, it is difficult to observe the exact motion parameters of the camera because of encoder measurement error of the robot. Therefore, observation errors in the generated environmental map accumulate in long movements of the robot. To generate a large environmental map, it is desirable not to assume known camera motion. In this paper, under the assumption of unknown motions of the camera, we propose a method to generate a stationary environmental map and estimate the egomotion by using an omnidirectional image sensor.