Ground plane feature detection in mobile vision-aided inertial navigation

In this paper, a method for determining ground plane features in a sequence of images captured by a mobile camera is presented. The hardware of the mobile system consists of a monocular camera that is mounted on an inertial measurement unit (IMU). An image processing procedure is proposed, first to extract image features and match them across consecutive image frames, and second to detect the ground plane features using a two-step algorithm. In the first step, the planar homography of the ground plane is constructed using an IMU-camera motion estimation approach. The obtained homography constraints are used to detect the most likely ground features in the sequence of images. To reject the remaining outliers, as the second step, a new plane normal vector computation approach is proposed. To obtain the normal vector of the ground plane, only three pairs of corresponding features are used for a general camera transformation. The normal-based computation approach generalizes the existing methods that are developed for specific camera transformations. Experimental results on real data validate the reliability of the proposed method.