Video with ground-truth for validation of visual registration, tracking and navigation algorithms

A fundamental task in computer vision is that of determining the position and orientation of a moving camera relative to an observed object or scene. Many such visual tracking algorithms have been proposed in the computer vision, artificial intelligence and robotics literature over the past 30 years. Predominantly, these remain un-validated since the ground-truth camera positions and orientations at each frame in a video sequence are not available for comparison with the outputs of the proposed vision systems. A method is presented for generating real visual test data with complete underlying ground-truth. The method enables the production of long video sequences, filmed along complicated six degree of freedom trajectories, featuring a variety of objects, in a variety of different visibility conditions, for which complete ground-truth data is known including the camera position and orientation at every image frame, intrinsic camera calibration data, a lens distortion model and models of the viewed objects.