Integrating Multiple Uncertain Views of a Static Scene Acquired by an Agile Camera System

This paper addresses the problem of merging multiple views of a static scene into a common coordinate frame, explicitly considering uncertainty. It assumes that a static world is observed by an agile vision system, whose movements are known with a limited precision, and whose observations are inaccurate and incomplete. It concentrates on acquiring uncertain three-dimensional information from multiple views, rather than on modeling or representing the information at higher levels of abstraction. Two particular problems receive attention: identifying the transformation between two viewing positions; and understanding how errors and uncertainties propagate as a result of applying the transformation. The first is solved by identifying the forward kinematics of the agile camera system. The second is solved by first treating a measurement of camera position and orientation as a uniformly distributed random vector whose component variances are related to the resolution of the encoding potentiometers, then treating an object position measurement as a normally distributed random vector whose component variances are experimentally derived, and finally determining the uncertainty of the merged points as functions of these variances. Comments University of Pennsylvania Department of Computer and Information Science Technical Report No. MSCIS-88-11. This technical report is available at ScholarlyCommons: http://repository.upenn.edu/cis_reports/465 INTEGRATING MULTIPLE UNCERTAIN VIEW OF A STATIC SCENE ACQUIRED BY AN AGILE CAMERA SYSTEM Eric Krotkov Ralf Kories MS-CIS-88-11 GRASP LAB 135 Department of Computer and Information Science School of Engineering and Applied Science University of Pennsylvania Philadelphia, PA 191 04