R Stolkin et al 2006 Meas. Sci. Technol. 17 2721 doi:10.1088/0957-0233/17/10/026
R Stolkin1, A Greig2 and J Gilby3
Show affiliationsAn important task in robot vision is that of determining the position, orientation and trajectory of a moving camera relative to an observed object or scene. Many such visual tracking algorithms have been proposed in the computer vision, artificial intelligence and robotics literature over the past 30 years. However, it is seldom possible to explicitly measure the accuracy of these algorithms, since the ground-truth camera positions and orientations at each frame in a video sequence are not available for comparison with the outputs of the proposed vision systems. A method is presented for generating real visual test data with complete underlying ground truth. The method enables the production of long video sequences, filmed along complicated six-degree-of-freedom trajectories, featuring a variety of objects and scenes, for which complete ground-truth data are known including the camera position and orientation at every image frame, intrinsic camera calibration data, a lens distortion model and models of the viewed objects. This work encounters a fundamental measurement problem—how to evaluate the accuracy of measured ground truth data, which is itself intended for validation of other estimated data. Several approaches for reasoning about these accuracies are described.
07.07.Tw Servo and control equipment; robots
06.20.fb Standards and calibration
07.07.Hj Display and recording equipment, oscilloscopes, TV cameras, etc.
Issue 10 (October 2006)
Received 19 February 2006, in final form 26 July 2006
Published 31 August 2006
R Stolkin et al 2006 Meas. Sci. Technol. 17 2721
J M Kilpatrick and J Watson 1988 J. Phys. D: Appl. Phys. 21 1701
Wanquan Jiang et al 2009 Smart Mater. Struct. 18 125013
Yoshiaki Ito et al 2004 J. Phys.: Condens. Matter 16 2033
Sukyoung Yi et al. 2000 ApJ 533 670
Zhores I Alferov et al 1978 Sov. Phys. Usp. 21 891
A. Markowitz et al. 2007 ApJ 656 116