Lab Meeting March 31st, 2008 (Ekker)

Title:Visual Odometry System Using Multiple Stereo Cameras and Inertial Measurement
Unit
Author:Taragay Oskiper, Zhiwei Zhu, Supun Samarasekera ,Rakesh Kumar
From:Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, 2007. CVPR '07. IEEE Conference, Publication Date:-22 June 2007


Abstract
Over the past decade, tremendous amount of research
activity has focused around the problem of localization in
GPS denied environments. Challenges with localization are
highlighted in human wearable systems where the operator
can freely move through both indoors and outdoors. In
this paper, we present a robust method that addresses these
challenges using a human wearable system with two pairs
of backward and forward looking stereo cameras together
with an inertial measurement unit (IMU). This algorithm
can run in real-time with 15Hz update rate on a dual-core
2GHz laptop PC and it is designed to be a highly accurate
local (relative) pose estimation mechanism acting as
the front-end to a Simultaneous Localization and Mapping
(SLAM) type method capable of global corrections through
landmark matching. Extensive tests of our prototype system
so far, reveal that without any global landmark matching,
we achieve between 0.5% and 1% accuracy in localizing a
person over a 500 meter travel indoors and outdoors. To
our knowledge, such performance results with a real time
system have not been reported before.