Passive Navigation in a partially known environment

The paper presents an integrated solution to the problem of obtaining the kinematics of a moving vehicle and the 3D locations of salient points in the external environment, based on a sequence of monocular images. The structure of a small number of navigational landmarks in the scene is assumed to be known. The parameters of interest are expressed in an inertial, or `world´ coordinate system, external to the moving vehicle, and are estimated recursively using an extended Kalman filter (EKF). The extraction and matching of feature points are done using a gabor wavelet representation, and are interleaved with the recursive estimation. Experimental results on a real image sequence are given