Three-dimensional ego-motion estimation from motion fields observed with multiple cameras

In this paper, we present a robust method to estimate the three-dimensional ego-motion of an observer moving in a static environment. This method combines the optical ow elds observed with multiple cameras to avoid the ambiguity of 3-D motion recovery due to small eld of view and small depth variation in the eld of view. Two residual functions are proposed to estimate the ego-motion for diierent situations. In the non-degenerate case, both the direction and the scale of the three-dimensional rotation and translation can be obtained. In the degenerate case, rotation can still be obtained but translation can only be obtained up to a scale factor. Both the number of cameras and the camera placement aaect the accuracy of the estimated ego-motion. We compare diierent camera conngurations through simulation. Some results of real-world experiments are also given to demonstrate the beneets of our method.