Range identification for perspective dynamic systems with 3D imaging surfaces

Range identification using image sequence via observations from a traditional camera-type vision system has been discussed in the literature. In this paper, the camera-type planar imaging surface is extended to several well-known 3D surfaces, such as an arbitrary plane, a sphere, an ellipsoid, and a paraboloid. For a general imaging surface, the resulting perspective dynamic system is not guaranteed to preserve an affine form. In this case, most-existing nonlinear observers that are applicable to the perspective dynamic system observed via a camera can not be applied for the range identification problem directly. We show via simulations that our recently proposed linear approximation observer can perform the state estimation.