The estimation of spatial positions by using an omnidirectional camera system

With an omnidirectional camera system, it is possible to take 360°views of the surrounding area at each camera position. These systems are used particularly in robotic applications, in autonomous navigation and supervision technology for ego­motion estimation. In addition to the visual capture of the environment itself, we can compute the parameters of orientation and position from image sequences, i.e. we get three parameters of position and three of orientation (yaw rate, pitch and roll angle) at each time of acquisition. The aim of the presented project is to investigate the quality of the spatial trajectory of a mobile survey vehicle from the recorded image sequences. In this paper, we explain the required photogrammetric background and show the advantages of omnidirectional camera systems for this task. We present the first results on our test set and discuss alternative applications for omnidirectional cameras.