3D SSD tracking with estimated 3D planes

We present a tracking method where full camera position and orientation is tracked from intensity differences ill a video sequence. The camera pose is calculated based on 3D planes, and hence does not depend on point correspondences. The plane based formulation also allows additional constraints to be naturally added, e.g., perpendicularity between walls, floor and ceiling surfaces, co-planarity of wall surfaces etc. A particular feature of our method is that the full 3D pose change is directly computed from temporal image differences without making a commitment to a particular intermediate (e.g., 2D feature) representation. We experimentally compared our method with regular 2D SSD tracking and found it more robust and stable. This is due to 3D consistency being enforced even in the low level registration of image regions. This yields better results than first computing (and hence committing to) 2D image features and then from these compute 3D pose. (C) 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.