Less restrictive camera odometry estimation from monocular camera

Abstract

This paper addresses the problem of estimating a camera motion from a non-calibrated monocular camera. Compared to existing methods that rely on restrictive assumptions, we propose a method which can estimate camera motion with much less restrictions by adopting new example-based techniques compensating the lack of information. Specifically, we estimate the focal length of the camera by referring to visually similar training images with which focal lengths are associated. For one step camera estimation, we refer to stationary points (landmark points) whose depths are estimated based on RGB-D candidates. In addition to landmark points, moving objects can be also used as an information source to estimate the camera motion. Therefore, our method simultaneously estimates the camera motion for a video, and the 3D trajectories of objects in this video by using Reversible Jump Markov Chain Monte Carlo (RJ-MCMC) particle filtering. Our method is evaluated on challenging datasets demonstrating its effectiveness and efficiency.