Absolute Pose Estimation of Central Cameras Using Planar Regions

A novel method is proposed for the absolute pose estimation of a central 2D camera with respect to 3D depth data without the use of any dedicated calibration pattern or explicit point correspondences. The proposed method has no specific assumption about the data source: plain depth information is expected from the 3D sensing device and a central camera is used to capture the 2D images. Both the perspective and omnidirectional central cameras are handled within a single generic camera model. Pose estimation is formulated as a 2D-3D nonlinear shape registration task which is solved without point correspondences or complex similarity metrics. It relies on a set of corresponding planar regions, and the pose parameters are obtained by solving an overdetermined system of nonlinear equations. The efficiency and robustness of the proposed method were confirmed on both large scale synthetic data and on real data acquired from various types of sensors.