Title
Efficient velocity estimation for MAVs by fusing motion from two frontally parallel cameras
Abstract
Efficient velocity estimation is crucial for the robust operation of navigation control loops of micro aerial vehicles (MAVs). Motivated by the research on how animals exploit their visual topographies to rapidly perform locomotion, we propose a bio-inspired method that applies quasi-parallax technique to estimate the velocity of an MAV equipped with a forward-looking stereo camera without GPS. Different to the available optical flow-based methods, our method can realize efficient metric velocity estimation without applying any depth information from either additional distance sensors or from stereopsis. In particular, the quasi-parallax technique, which claims to press maximal benefits from the configuration of two frontally parallel cameras, leverages pairs of parallel visual rays to eliminate rotational flow for translational velocity estimation, followed by refinement of the estimation of rotational velocity and translational velocity iteratively and alternately. Our method fuses the motion information from two frontal-parallel cameras without performing correspondences matching, achieving enhanced robustness and efficiency. Extensive experiments on synthesized and actual scenes demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our method.
Year
DOI
Venue
2019
10.1007/s11554-018-0752-5
Journal of Real-Time Image Processing
Keywords
Field
DocType
Velocity estimation,Micro aerial vehicle,Quasi-parallax,Optical flow
Computer vision,Stereo camera,Angular velocity,Stereopsis,Computer science,Robustness (computer science),Real-time computing,Global Positioning System,Artificial intelligence,Fuse (electrical),Optical flow,Velocity estimation
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
16
6
1861-8219
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
0
0.34
7
Authors
6
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Zhi Gao13310.15
Ramesh Bharath2478.96
Wen-Yan Lin300.34
pengfei wang47516.56
Xu Yan500.34
Ruifang Zhai652.12