Calculation of the Epipolar Line based on the Monocular Camera and the Inertial Sensor

Abstract

This paper is concerned with the calculation of the epipolax line based on the time series images of a moving monocular camera. The purpose of our research is to present a simple method to calculate the epipolar line with sufficient accuracy for matching between the time series images. In this paper we propose an useful method which allows as to calculate the epipolar line by using the compound sensor that combined a monocular camera and an inertial sensor. The inertial sensor gives us the rotation angles and the accelerated velocity vectors of the camera. First, a pair of camera-images is changed into the relation of parallel stereo vision, by the use of the rotation angles. And the baseline between the parallel images is determined by using the rotation data and the acceleration data. Next, the epipolar line of a targeted point is obtained. Moreover, we show the validity of this method which used the combined sensor that can be applied even when a camera carries out movement of 6 degrees of freedom, by the experiment using the camera images and the inertial sensor's data. © 2003, The Institute of Electrical Engineers of Japan. All rights reserved.