Continuous Pose Estimation for Stereo Vision based on UV Disparity Applied to Visual Odometry in Urban Environments

This paper presents an autocalibration method to determine the pose of a stereo vision system based on knowing the geometry of the ground in front of the cameras. This pose changes considerably while the vehicle is driven, therefore it is good to know constantly the pose of the camera for several applications based on computer vision, such as advanced driver assistance systems, autonomous vehicles or robotics. These constant changes of the pose make interesting to be able to detect constantly the variations in its extrinsic parameters (height, pitch, roll). The validation of the autocalibration method is accomplished by a visual odometry implementation. A study of the improvement of the results of the visual odometry estimation taking into account the changes of the camera pose is presented, demonstrating the advantages of the autocalibration method.