6DOF pose measurement with dual-quaternion-introduced absolute orientation using a pseudo-multi-camera system

Pose measurement, consisting of position determination and orientation recovery, is applied in many intelligent manufacturing fields. In this paper, six-degree-of-freedom (6DOF) pose measurement with dual-quaternion-introduced absolute orientation using a pseudo-multi-camera system is presented. By planning to straight move and rotate the single camera at a reasonable angle, a pseudo-multi-camera system with the required viewpoints and baseline distances is generated to dynamically build a measurement network. Based on multi-view localization beams from the measurement network, a stereo recovery method is proposed to allow three-dimensional (3D) extraction. Dual-quaternion-introduced absolute orientation for 6DOF estimation is studied to avoid translation extraction dependent on rotation and strict initial value selection. Considering the feature point information from different viewpoints, the 6DOF pose is further refined by multi-view bundle adjustment. The experiment results show that our method outperforms classical methods in accuracy and stability, especially in translation measurement. It also can arrange observation points as needed to adapt to complex measurement scenes. It is expected to be used in scenarios where traditional multi-camera setups are infeasible, such as pipeline inspection, gastrointestinal endoscopy, and shield machine guidance.