Trajectography of an uncalibrated stereo rig in urban environments

This paper describes an original method to compute the relative motion of an uncalibrated stereo rig in urban environments from features lying on the road. The extraction of significant reliable features on the road remains the critical step of this method. We nevertheless detect them according to the stereo constraints and an a priori knowledge on the scene. The motion between two frames of the stereo rig is considered as rigid: the homography computation is enforced by the redundancy of the feature locations in multiple views. The method has been tested on video sequences recorded from a test vehicle that was driven in an urban environment. Promising results from these experiments are presented.