Our work on
Integration
of Vision and
Inertial Sensors
Introduction
Motivation for
Inertial and Vision
Sensors Integration
Inertial sensors attached to a camera can provide valuable
data about camera pose and movement. In biological vision systems,
inertial cues provided by the vestibular system, are fused with vision
at an early processing stage.
The 3D structured world is observed by the visual sensor, and its pose
and motion parameters directly measured by the inertial sensors. These
motion parameters can also be inferred from the image flow and known
scene features. Combining the two sensing modalities simplifies the 3D
reconstruction of the observed world. The inertial sensors also provide
important cues about the observed scene structure, such as vertical and
horizontal references.
The vestibular system plays an important role in human and animal
vision. The vestibulo-ocular reflex is used for image stabilisation,
and the sense of motion and posture is derived from inertial cues and
visual flow. Vision processing also has “preferred” horizontal and
vertical directions aligned with vestibular system
MEMs sensors and human vestibular system have similar
performance. Single chip inertial sensors can be easily included in
artificial vision systems, enabling the integration of
artificial vision and inertial sensing for 3D reconstruction, visual
navigation, augmented reality and related aplications.
Data from
Inertial Sensors
Inertial sensors provide direct measurements of body
acceleation and angular velocity, from which other quantities can be
derived
Inertial
Navigation Principles
At the most basic level, an inertial system simply performs a double
integration of sensed acceleration over time to estimate position.
But since body rotations occur, this integration has to be done in the
navigation frame of reference, as shown in this block diagram of a
strapdown inertial navigation system.
The inertial sensors, typically an orthogonal set of 3 accelerometers
and 3 gyros, compose the IMU (Inertial Measurement Unit).
Data from
Vision Sensors
Projection
onto Unit Sphere
Camera vision sensors provide images, with pixels corresponding to
measurements of projective ray direction and colour or gray level
intensity. This can be modeled with a projection onto a unit sphere as
shown bellow
Image points are represented by projective ray direction m1, m2
And image lines by the normal to the line projection plane n=m1
x m2
Vanishing
Points and Vanishing Lines
Under the camera projection, phenomena that only occurs at infinity
will project to very finite locations in the image. The projection of
parallel lines meet at their vanishing point. Under the unit sphere
projection, the vanishing point given by line direction m=n1
x n2.
The set of vanising points of lines belonging to the same world plane
define a common vanishing line
Vision and
Inertial Sensing
How does gravity
show up in the camera?
Inertial sensors provide an important external reference by sensing
gravity.
Gravity can also be observed by the camera as the vanishing point of
vertical features.
How does linear
and angular motion show up in the camera?
Optical flow
and Spherical motion field
If the camera experiences both rotation ω and translation t the fixed
world Pi given in the
camera referential will have a motion
vector given by
The motion field projected onto the unit sphere is given by
This equation describes the velocity vector for a given unit sphere
point mi as a function of
camera ego motion (t,ω) and point depth.
Image focus
of expansion (FOE)
Image center
of rotation (COR)
Both FOE and COR are known from inertial data alone (if system is
calibrated).
Frames of
Reference
The camera and the inertail sensors in the IMU have different frames of
reference.
If the system uses a rigid mout, than the two are related by an unkown
rotation and translation. In some cases this can be known, to some
degree, from construction.
Calibrating
Camera - IMU rotation and translation
Assuming a rigid mount between the camera and the IMU, we can assume a
fixed rotation and a static boresight calibration method can be
performed. If both sensors are used to measure the vertical
direction, with
a set of observations at different camera positions, the unknown
rotation quaternion can be determined.
When the IMU sensed acceleration is equal in magnitude to gravity, the
sensed direction is the vertical. For the camera, either using a
specific calibration target, such as a chessboard placed vertically, or
assuming the scene has enough predominant vertical edges, the vertical
direction can be taken from the corresponding vanishing point. However
camera calibration is need to obtain the correct 3D orientation of the
vanishing points.
If n observations are made
for distinct camera positions, recording the vertical reference
provided by the inertial sensors and the vanishing point of scene
vertical features, the absolute orientation can be determined using
Horn's method. Since we are only observing a 3D direction in space, we
can only determine the rotation between the two frames of reference.
Let Ivi be a
measurement of the vertical by the inertial sensors, and Cvi
the corresponding measurement made by the camera derived from some
scene vanishing point. We want to determine the unit quaternion q that rotates inertial measurements
in the inertial sensor frame of reference I to the camera
frame of reference C.
In the following equations, when multiplying vectors with quaternions,
the corresponding imaginary quaternions are implied. We want to find
the unit quaternion q that
maximizes
after some manipulation we want to where matrix N can be
expressed using the sums for all i
of all 9 pairing products of the components of the two vectors Ivi
and Cvi. The
sums contain all the information that is required to find the solution.
Since N is
a symmetric matrix, the solution to this problem is the four-vector qmax corresponding to the
largest eigenvalue of N, and a a
closed form solution is obtained.
In a test sequence, the camera was moved through several poses with the
vertical chessboard target in sight, and all IMU data and images
logged. The camera calibration was performed with images sampled from
the complete set recorded.
The figure below shows some of the reconstructed camera positions.
The estimated rotation has an angle 91.25° about an axis
(0.89,−0.27,−0.3582), and is about the expected one,
given the mechanical mount, of a near right angle approximately about
the x axis. Re-projecting the inertial sensor
data showed consistency of the method. The mean-square error in the
re-projected verticals was 1.570◦.
In another test, where 14 observations were made, the mean-square error
in the re-projected verticals was 1.312°. The next table show this
result and the error obtained using less observations,
and below two of the frames used and corresponding unit shere model
with the projected image, the vanishing point construction, the IMU
measured vertical and its re-projection to the camera frame.
Results using
Gravity as
a Vertical Reference:
Vertical
Reference
Accelerometers measure gravity vector g summed with body acceleration ab
When system is motionless, gravity vector provides attitude reference
Gyros can be used to update the vertical reference when there is body
acceleration.
Artificial
Horizon
Having the vertical reference, the horizon line is know and given by
Camera
Calibration with single vanishing point
Using just one vanishing point, obtained from two parallel lines
belonging to some levelled plane, and using the cameras attitude taken
from the inertial sensors, the unknown scaling factor f in the camera’s perspective
projection can be estimated.
Given a single levelled plane vainishing point (x,y) in the image plane and the
vertical reference n, the
horizon line is given by
Focal distance f can be
calibrated if camera and IMU are aligned or their rotation is known.
The proposed method is outlined below:
The camera is set to observe a simple scene of a levelled
rectangle. The image gradient is computed using a modified Sobel filter
that has a lower gradient direction angle error:
,
with
Image edges are obtained by thresholding the gradient magnitude
and image line detection is done using the Hough transform
To speedup the computation a fast Hough transform is done using the
gradient provided by the modified Sobel filter.
The highest peaks correspond to image lines.
Vanishing points are given by line intersections:
A vanishing point (u,v) of a set of parallel lines from a levelled
plane belong to the horizon line, and hence f is given by
Shown bellow are some calibration results using this method.
A planar rectangular target was used and rotated through 19 positions,
with 10 samples taken at each position (avi 1.2MB)
or animated gif (0.27MB)
A lower error was achived using the vertical reference and nearer
vanishing point, since the more unstable vanishing point is avoided.
In another test the Camera Calibration Toolbox for Matlab (based on
Intel Open Source Computer Vision Library) was used as a standard for
comparison. The matlab calibration was performed with 20 images of a
chessboard target, obtaining f =617.57084
± 10.35554 (shown by the blue line and shaded area in the chart
below). For the Estimation of f
with just one vanishing point and n,
two target positions with a near vanishing point were used with 100
samples taken at each target position. The estimated f is shown in red in the
chart below and has mean=613,02 and std=2,62.
We can see that the proposed method provides a good estimate of f , within the uncertainty of the
standard method.
The main sources of error are the vanishing point instability,
evidenced by the stepwise results obtained in previous test, and the
noise in the vertical reference provided by the low cost
accelerometers. Nevertheless the method is feasible and provides a
reasonable estimate for a completely
uncalibrated camera. The
advantage over using two vanishing points is that the best (i.e. more
stable) vanishing point can be chosen. Another advantage is that in
indoors environment
the vanishing point point can sometimes be obtained from the scene
without placing any specific calibration target, since. ground plane
parallel lines can be easily detected.
Ground Plane
Segmentation
The ground plane is determied by the vertical reference n, up to unkown depth d
Another approach to inertial and vision sensor integration is to use
standard vision techniques to compute depth maps, and than rotate and
align them using the inertial reference. The advantage of reducing the
search space explored above is lost, but current technology provides
real-time depth maps with reasonable quality, and the inertial data
fusion is still very useful at a later step to align and register the
obtained maps.
Using the vertical reference, dense depth maps provided by a stereo
vision system can be segmented to identify horizontal and vertical
features. The aim is on having a simple algorithm suitable for a
real-time implementation. Since we are able to map the points to an
inertial reference frame, planar levelled patches will have the same
depth z, and vertical
features the same xy,
allowing simple feature segmentation using histogram local peak
detection. The diagram below summarizes the proposed depth map
segmentation method.
The depth map points are mapped to the world frame of reference. In
order to detect the ground plane, a histogram is performed for the
different heights. The histogram's lower local peak, zgnd, is used as the
reference height for the ground plane.
We are using the Small
Vision System (SVS) from SRI to obtain real-time
depth maps since they provide an efficient implementation of area
correlation stereo. The linux version is shown below, computing a depth
map for the oberved scene.
Adding to the static view provided by the standard SVS, we programed a
3D dynamic view, incorporating a rotation to the inertial
reference and ground plane
detection. This and other results of ground plane detection and
depth map rectification are shown below. mpeg movie
(3MB)
Another movie with points above the floor shown in green: avi movie
(7.5MB) or
Set of resuts with top and side view of alinged 3D point cloud:
Dynamic inertial data provides aproximation for 2D translation and
rotation registration of depth map points.
Results using
Velocity
and Acceleration
visuo-inertial
tracker
(under development...)
Experimental
setups used
First Inertial
System Prototype
First Inertial System Prototype for use with a mobile robot
InerCube
After the initial tests with the inertial sensors, we chose
to build our own inertial measurement unit prototype. We were able to
tailor the system to our specific needs, and gain a better insight into
the technology, working towards a low-cost inertial and vision system
for robotic applications, within the available budget. The sensors used
in the prototype system include a three-axial accelerometer, three
gyroscopes and a dual-axis inclinometer. A temperature sensor is also
included to enable implementation of temperature error compensation.
The three-axial accelerometer chosen for the system, while minimising
eventual alignment problems, did not add much to the equivalent cost of
three separate single-axis sensors. The device used was Summit Instruments’
34103A three-axial capacitive accelerometer. In order to keep track of
rotation on the x-, y- and z-axis, three gyroscopes were used. The
piezoelectric vibrating prism gyroscope Gyrostar ENV-011D built by Murata was chosen. Initially tilt
about the x and y-axis was measured with a dual axis AccuStar electronic
inclinometer, built by Lucas Sensing Systems (now schaevitz). The
inertial sensors were mounted inside an acrylic cube, enabling the
correct alignment of the gyros, inclinometer (mounted on the outside)
and accelerometer, as can be seen above. This inertial system can
measure angular velocity with 0.1 deg.s−1 resolution, and linear
acceleration with 0.005 g resolution.