Localization of a monocular camera using a feature-based probabilistic map

Abstract

In this paper, a novel localization method for a monocular camera is proposed by using a feature-based probabilistic map. The localization of a camera is generally estimated from 3D-to-2D correspondences between a 3D map and an image plane through the PnP algorithm. In the computer vision communities, an accurate 3D map is generated by optimization using a large number of image dataset for camera pose estimation. In robotics communities, a camera pose is estimated by probabilistic approaches with lack of feature. Thus, it needs an extra system because the camera system cannot estimate a full state of the robot pose. Therefore, we propose an accurate localization method for a monocular camera using a probabilistic approach in the case of an insufficient image dataset without any extra system. In our system, features from a probabilistic map are projected into an image plane using linear approximation. By minimizing Mahalanobis distance between the projected features from the probabilistic map and extracted features from a query image, the accurate pose of the monocular camera is estimated from an initial pose obtained by the PnP algorithm. The proposed algorithm is demonstrated through simulations in a 3D space.