Observability of planar combined relative pose and target model estimation using monocular vision

This paper presents an observability analysis of the relative pose estimation process used in a planar Position-Based Visual Servoing or visual Simultaneous Localization and Mapping system. The results indicate potentially problematic situations where an estimator may be unable to track the relative pose and target object model based on monocular camera measurements alone. A complete set of unobservable configurations for a linearized relative pose system with a general constant velocity motion model, are determined by examining the observability matrix structure, both for the cases when the target object model point feature coordinates are known and unknown a priori.