Visual Odometry from Two Point Correspondences and Initial Automatic Tilt Calibration

Ego-motion estimation is an important step towards fully autonomous mobile robots. In this paper we propose the use of an initial but automatic camera tilt calibration, which transforms the subsequent motion estimation to a 2D rigid body motion problem. This transformed problem is solved 2-optimally using RANSAC and a two-point method for rigid body motion. The method is experimentally evaluated using a camera mounted onto a mobile platform. The results are compared to measurements from a highly accurate external camera positioning system which are used as gold standard. The experiments show promising results on real data. © 2017 by SCITEPRESS - Science and Technology Publications, Lda.