Planar motion estimation using omnidirectional camera and laser rangefinder

The vision based motion estimation has been investigated in the last few years. Although some progresses have been made in the assumption of planar, still there are no methods satisfying the high accuracy and real-time with absolute translation. This paper proposes a method to estimate vehicle motion by the fusion of omnidirectional camera and laser rangefinder to overcome the drawbacks mentioned above. The vehicle motion contains of rotation and translation components. The rotation is estimated based on the simple but efficient edge matching method by using camera. The absolute translation problem is solved based on ICP method by using laser rangefinder. The experiments were carried out using an electric vehicle with a camera mounted on the roof and a laser device mounted on the bumper. In order to evaluate the motion estimation, the vehicle positions were compared with GPS information and superimposed onto aerial images collected by Google map API. The experimental results showed that the error is 1.1 times smaller and the computational cost is 10.4 times faster than the 1-Point RANSAC method. Also, the error is 4.1 times smaller than the method based on appearance color features.