Visual navigation using a single camera

We assess the usefulness of monocular recursive motion estimation techniques for vehicle navigation in the absence of a model for the environment. For this purpose we extend a recently proposed recursive motion estimator, the Essential filter, to handle scale estimation. We examine experimentally the accuracy with which the motion and position of the vehicle may be computed on an 8000 frame indoors sequence. The issues of sampling time frequency and number of necessary features in the environment are addressed systematically