Leveraging Feature Uncertainty in the PnP Problem

We propose a real-time and accurate solution to the Perspective-n-Point (PnP) problem –estimating the pose of a calibrated camera from n 3D-to-2D point correspondences– that exploits the fact that in practice the 2D position of not all 2D features is estimated with the same accuracy. Assuming a model of such feature uncertainties is known in advance, we reformulate the PnP problem as a maximum likelihood minimization approximated by an unconstrained Sampson error function, which naturally penalizes the most noisy correspondences. The advantages of this approach are thoroughly demonstrated in synthetic experiments where feature uncertainties are exactly known. Pre-estimating the features uncertainties in real experiments is, though, not easy. In this paper we model feature uncertainty as 2D Gaussian distributions representing the sensitivity of the 2D feature detectors to different camera viewpoints. When using these noise models with our PnP formulation we still obtain promising pose estimation results that outperform the most recent approaches.