Recovering ego-motion from optical flow for aerial navigation

A new solution to recover 6DoF (Degrees of Freedom) ego-motion is present. The problem is to estimate the ego-motion information solely from dense optical flow (OF) field efficiently and robustly, free of Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU). The algorithm is a hierarchical framework and in each level there exist three parts, which are the optical flow Computation(OFC), the ego-motion estimation(EME) from two different models, and image warping(IW) according to the EME for the next level. The numerical precision of the algorithm under noise was investigated in the paper. We also compared its performance with Srinivasan's interpolation method and the 4DoF affine model on real aerial images. Our method are more accurate under large displacements and can resist the impacts of the rotations around x and y axis in a reasonable extent during computer navigation simulation.