A visual positioning system for vehicle navigation

Localization of a vehicle is a key component for driving assistance or autonomous navigation. In this work, we propose a visual positioning system (VPS) for vehicle or mobile robot navigation. Different from general landmark-based or model-based approaches, which rely on some predefined known landmarks or a priori information about the environment, no assumptions on the prior knowledge of the scene are made. A stereo-based vision system is built for both extracting feature correspondences and recovering 3-D information of the scene from image sequences. Relative positions of the camera motion are then estimated by registering the 3-D feature points from two consecutive image frames. Localization of the vehicle is finally given by the reference to its initial position.