IMPROVING CAMERA POSE ESTIMATION USING SWARM PARTICLE ALGORITHMS

Abstract. Most computer vision and photogrammetry applications rely on accurately estimating the camera pose, such as visual navigation, motion tracking, stereo photogrammetry, and structure from motion. The Essential matrix is a well-known model in computer vision that provides information about the relative orientation between two images, including the rotation and translation, for calibrated cameras with a known camera matrix. To estimate the Essential matrix, the camera calibration matrices, which include focal length and principal point location must be known, and the estimation process typically requires at least five matching points and the use of robust algorithms, such as RANSAC to fit a model to the data as a robust estimator. From the usually large number of matched points, choosing five points, the Essential matrix can be determined based on a simple solution, which could be good or bad. Obtaining a globally optimal and accurate camera pose estimation, however, requires additional steps, such as using evolutionary algorithms (EA) or swarm algorithms (SA), to prevent getting trapped in local optima by searching for solutions within a potentially huge solution space.

This paper aims to introduce an improved method for estimating the Essential matrix using swarm particle algorithms that are known to efficiently solve complex problems. Various optimization techniques, including EAs and SAs, such as Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO), Gray Wolf Optimization (GWO), Improved Gray Wolf Optimization (IGWO), Genetic Algorithm (GA), Salp Swarm Algorithm (SSA) and Whale Optimization Algorithm (WOA), are explored to obtain the global minimum of the reprojection error for the five-point Essential matrix estimation based on using symmetric geometric error cost function. The experimental results on a dataset with known camera orientation demonstrate that the IGWO method has achieved the best score compared to other techniques and significantly speeds up the camera pose estimation for larger number of point pairs in contrast to traditional methods that use the collinearity equations in an iterative adjustment.