A real-time system for epipolar geometry and ego-motion estimation

A visually guided mobile platform acting in a dynamic environment needs information, delivered from cues such as stereo and motion. In this paper a binocular stereo system, capable of dynamic vergence and ego-motion estimation, will be presented. The ability to dynamically verge the cameras is essential for visual tasks such as tracking, recognition and manipulation, since the computation of 3D geometry will be considerably simplified at fixation. We will show that the epipolar geometry of the presented system can be estimated in real-time. The number of degrees of freedom has been minimized, without affecting the flexibility of the system. Reconstructed 3D data is used in order to determine the ego-motion of the platform, at a very low computational cost. Finally, it will be shown how disparity maps and estimated ego-motion can facilitate the localization of independently moving objects