Design and Analysis of a Single-Camera Omnistereo Sensor for Quadrotor Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAVs)

We describe the design and 3D sensing performance of an omnidirectional stereo (omnistereo) vision system applied to Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAVs). The proposed omnistereo sensor employs a monocular camera that is co-axially aligned with a pair of hyperboloidal mirrors (a vertically-folded catadioptr...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Sensors (Basel, Switzerland) Switzerland), 2016-02, Vol.16 (2), p.217-217
Main Authors: Jaramillo, Carlos, Valenti, Roberto G, Guo, Ling, Xiao, Jizhong
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
3D perception
Aircraft
catadioptrics
Equipment Design
Image Enhancement
Image Interpretation, Computer-Assisted - methods
Imaging, Three-Dimensional - instrumentation
Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAVs)
Micro air vehicles (MAV)
omnistereo
Payloads
Photogrammetry - instrumentation
Photography - methods
Projective geometry
Sensors
Space perception
Spatial resolution
Vision systems
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Summary:We describe the design and 3D sensing performance of an omnidirectional stereo (omnistereo) vision system applied to Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAVs). The proposed omnistereo sensor employs a monocular camera that is co-axially aligned with a pair of hyperboloidal mirrors (a vertically-folded catadioptric configuration). We show that this arrangement provides a compact solution for omnidirectional 3D perception while mounted on top of propeller-based MAVs (not capable of large payloads). The theoretical single viewpoint (SVP) constraint helps us derive analytical solutions for the sensor's projective geometry and generate SVP-compliant panoramic images to compute 3D information from stereo correspondences (in a truly synchronous fashion). We perform an extensive analysis on various system characteristics such as its size, catadioptric spatial resolution, field-of-view. In addition, we pose a probabilistic model for the uncertainty estimation of 3D information from triangulation of back-projected rays. We validate the projection error of the design using both synthetic and real-life images against ground-truth data. Qualitatively, we show 3D point clouds (dense and sparse) resulting out of a single image captured from a real-life experiment. We expect the reproducibility of our sensor as its model parameters can be optimized to satisfy other catadioptric-based omnistereo vision under different circumstances.
ISSN:1424-8220
1424-8220
DOI:10.3390/s16020217