Determining 3-D Translational Motion by the Parallel Trinocular

Incorporating a third CCD camera into a conventional binocular is verified to be very helpful to solve translational motion. The extra device not only provides more image information, but also plays a significant role regarding the solution issue. In this paper, a novel algorithm to recover parameters for translational motion using such a parallel trinocular system is presented. This approach overcomes the difficulty of matrix singularity happened in binocular. In order to fit into application requirements, a compact close form solution is also derived. This solution owns some important features, such as no matrix manipulation, no danger of matrix singularity, and easy to apply. To validate this close form solution, extensive experiments were conducted It is concluded that the movement magnitude in the depth direction has great influence on the estimation performance of the translational motion. Simulations in a perturbed environment are also performed to study the effect of possible image uncertainty. Compared with a conventional binocular, the presented parallel trinocular system demonstrates excellent performance on recovering parameters of translational motion under the circumstance of limited motion along the depth direction.