Range identification for perspective dynamic systems with 3D imaging surfaces

Range identification using image sequence via observations from a traditional camera-type vision system has been discussed in the literature. In this paper, the camera-type planar imaging surface is extended to several well-known 3D surfaces, such as an arbitrary, plane, a sphere,, an ellipsoid, and a paraboloid. For a general imaging surface, the resulting perspective dynamic system is not guaranteed to preserve an affine form. In this case, most existing nonlinear observers that are applicable to the perspective dynamic system observed via a camera can not be applied for the range identification problem directly. We show via simulations that our recently proposed linear approximation observer can perform the state estimation.