Navigating in Manhattan: 3D orientation from video without correspondences

The problem of inferring 3D orientation of a camera from video sequences has been mostly addressed by first computing correspondences of image features. This intermediate step is now seen as the main bottleneck of those approaches. In this paper, we propose a new 3D orientation estimation method for urban (indoor and outdoor) environments, which avoids correspondences between frames. The basic scene property exploited by our method is that many edges are oriented along three orthogonal directions; this is the recently introduced Manhattan world (MW) assumption. In addition to the novel adoption of the MW assumption for video analysis, we introduce the small rotation (SR) assumption, that expresses the fact that the video camera undergoes a smooth 3D motion. Using these two assumptions, we build a probabilistic estimation approach. We demonstrate the performance of our method using real video sequences.