Photogeometric Direct Visual Tracking for Central Omnidirectional Cameras

Abstract

The fundamental task of visual tracking is considered in this work as a direct image registration problem. Direct methods refer to those that exploit the pixel intensities without intermediate steps, e.g., no extraction of image features. This article proposes new photogeometric transformation models and nonlinear optimization methods for directly registering central omnidirectional images. The proposed models ensure robustness to arbitrary illumination changes, as well as encompass all classes of projective deformations of planar objects within those images. Experimental results show that visual tracking can indeed be highly robust and accurate even for this type of vision systems.