A New Multi-Sensor Registration Technique for Three Dimensional Scene Modeling with Application to Unmanned Vehicle Mobility Enhancement

摘要

The focus of this paper is on the reconstruction of 3D representations of real world scenes and objects using multiple sensors with, as one of its main applications, the enhancement of the autonomy and mobility of unmanned vehicles. The sensors considered are primarily range acquisition devices (such as laser scanners and stereo systems) that allow the recovery of 3D geometry. One of the most important technical challenges that we are addressing is the registration task in both its multi-modal and single modality aspects. Our work is based on a unified approach that formulates the correspondence problem as an optimization task. In this context we developed a criterion that can be used for 3D free-form shape registration. The new criterion is derived from simple Boolean matching principles by approximation and relaxation. Technically, one of the main advantages of the proposed approach is convexity in the neighborhood of the alignment parameters and continuous differentiability, allowing for the use of standard gradient-based optimization techniques. The proposed algorithm allows also for a significant automation of the scene modeling task by reducing the intervention of human operators in the tedious image registration task. Furthermore, we show that the criterion can be computed in linear time complexity which permits the fast implementation critical in many applications of autonomous mobile platforms.