Fast Relative Motion Estimation from a Single Feature Correspondence by Exploiting Nonholonomic Constraints

Authors: Davide Scaramuzza & Roland Siegwart.

Time: 9:55-10:20

This paper presents a new method to estimate the relative motion of a vehicle from images of a single camera. The computational cost of the algorithm is limited only by the feature extraction process, as the outlier removal and the motion estimation steps take less than 1 millisecond with a normal laptop computer. The biggest problem in visual motion estimation is data association; matched points contain many outliers that must be detected and removed for the motion to be accurately estimated. In the last few years, a very established method for removing outliers has been the ì5-point RANSACî algorithm which needs a minimum of 5 point correspondences to estimate the model hypotheses. Because of this, however, it can require up to several hundreds of iterations to find a set of points free of outliers. In this paper, we show that by exploiting the nonholonomic constraints of wheeled vehicles it is possible to use a restrictive motion model which allows us to parameterize the motion with only 1 point correspondence.

Using a single feature correspondence for motion estimation is the lowest model parameterization possible and results in the two most efficient algorithms for removing outliers: 1-point RANSAC and histogram voting. To support our method we run many experiments on both synthetic and real data. Finally, we show an application of our method to visual odometry by recovering a 3Km trajectory in a cluttered urban environment and in real-time.