Estimating Camera Position and Posture by Using Feature Landmark Database

Estimating camera position and posture can be applied to the fields of augmented reality and robot navigation. In these fields, to obtain absolute position and posture of the camera, sensor-based methods using GPS and magnetic sensors and vision-based methods using input images from the camera have been investigated. However, sensor-based methods are difficult to synchronize the camera and sensors accurately, and usable environments are limited according to selection of sensors. On the other hand, vision-based methods need to allocate many artificial markers otherwise an estimation error will accumulate. Thus, it is difficult to use such methods in large and natural environments. This paper proposes a vision-based camera position and posture estimation method for large environments, which does not require sensors and artificial markers by detecting natural feature points from image sequences taken beforehand and using them as landmarks.