Estimating the kinematics and structure of a rigid object from a sequence of monocular images

The problem considered involves the use of a sequence of noisy monocular images of a three-dimensional moving object to estimate both its structure and kinematics. The object is assumed to be rigid, and its motion is assumed to be smooth. A set of object match points is assumed to be available, consisting of fixed features on the object, the image plane coordinates of which have been extracted from successive images in the sequence. Structure is defined as the 3-D positions of these object feature points, relative to each other. Rotational motion occurs about the origin of an object-centered coordinate system, while translational motion is that of the origin of this coordinate system. In this work, which is a continuation of the research done by the authors and reported previously (ibid., vol.PAMI-8, p.90-9, Jan. 1986), results of an experiment with real imagery are presented, involving estimation of 28 unknown translational, rotational, and structural parameters, based on 12 images with seven feature points