Vision based terrain reconstruction for planet rover using a special binocular bundle adjustment

This paper presents a pure vision based technique for 3D reconstruction of planet terrain. The reconstruction accuracy depends ultimately on an optimization technique known as 'bundle adjustment'. In vision techniques, the translation is only known up to a scale factor, and a single scale factor is assumed for the whole sequence of images if only one camera is used. If an extra camera is available, stereo vision based reconstruction can be obtained by binocular views. If the baseline of the stereo setup is known, the scale factor problem is solved. We found that direct application of classical bundle adjustment on the constraints inherent between the binocular views has not been tested. Our method incorporated this constraint into the conventional bundle adjustment method. This special binocular bundle adjustment has been performed on image sequences similar to planet terrain circumstances. Experimental results show that our special method enhances not only the localization accuracy, but also the terrainmapping quality.