Generalized laser three-point algorithm for motion estimation of camera-laser fusion system

This paper presents a new structure-from-motion (SFM) technique called `generalized laser three-point' algorithm. It is designed to estimate the motion of the camera-laser fusion system which consists of a 2D laser sensor and multiple cameras. The laser points are projected onto the images and tracked to other frames to be used as 3D-2D correspondences. However, the typical three-point algorithms cannot estimate the motion of the system if three points are collinear. Using the laser points as 3D points, this case happens frequently if the laser sensor scans a large plane (e.g. open ground). Even in that case, two frames of the laser data are not collinear if the system is moved while it captures the frames. Among three point correspondences required to estimate the motion, we select two points and the other point from different frames. We estimate the relative pose between the frames by solving an 8-degree polynomial equation. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm is more appropriate for our fusion system than the previous algorithms.