Homography-based Egomotion Estimation Using Gravity and SIFT Features

Yaqing Ding, Daniel Barath, Zuzana Kukelova; Proceedings of the Asian Conference on Computer Vision (ACCV), 2020

Camera systems used, e.g., in cars, UAVs, smartphones, and tablets, are typically equipped with IMUs (inertial measurement units) that can measure the gravity vector. Using the information from an IMU, the y-axes of cameras can be aligned with the gravity, reducing their relative orientation to a single DOF (degree of freedom). In this paper, we use the gravity information to derive extremely efficient minimal solvers for homography-based egomotion estimation from orientation- and scale-covariant features. We use the fact that orientation- and scale-covariant features, such as SIFT or ORB, provide additional constraints on the homography. Based on the prior knowledge about the target plane (horizontal/vertical/general plane, w.r.t. the gravity direction) and using the SIFT/ORB constraints, we derive new minimal solvers that require fewer correspondences than traditional approaches and, thus, speed up the robust estimation procedure significantly. The proposed solvers are compared with the state-of-the-art point-based solvers on both synthetic data and real images, showing comparable accuracy and significant improvement in terms of speed. The implementation of our solvers is available at https://github.com/yaqding/relativepose-sift-gravity.