This paper provides a tutorial introduction to visual servo control of robotic manipulators. Since the topic spans many disciplines our goal is limited to providing a basic conceptual framework. We begin by reviewing the prerequisite topics from robotics and computer vision, including a brief review of coordinate transformations, velocity representation, and a description of the geometric aspects of the image formation process. We then present a taxonomy of visual servo control systems. The two major classes of systems, position-based and image-based systems, are then discussed. Since any visual servo system must be capable of tracking image features in a sequence of images, we include an overview of feature-based and correlation-based methods for tracking. We conclude the tutorial with a number of observations on the current directions of the research field of visual servo control. 1 Introduction Today there are over 800,000 robots in the world, mostly working in factory environment...

Model-based recognition and motion tracking depends upon the ability to solve for projection and model parameters that will best fit a 3-D model to matching 2-D image features. This paper extends current methods of parameter solving to handle objects with arbitrary curved surfaces and with any number of internal parameters representing articulations, variable dimensions, or surface deformations. Numerical

In this paper, we describe a method for finding the pose of an object from a single image. We assume that we can detect and match in the image four or more noncoplanar feature points of the object, and that we know their relative geometry on the object. The method combines two algorithms

Determining the rigid transformation relating 2D images to known 3D geometry is a classical problem in photogrammetry and computer vision. Heretofore, the best methods for solving the problem have relied on iterative optimization methods which cannot be proven to converge and/or which do not effectively account for the orthonormal structure of rotation matrices. We show that the pose estimation problem can be formulated as that of minimizing an error metric based on collinearity in object (as opposed to image) space. Using object space collinearity error, we derive an iterative algorithm which directly computes orthogonal rotation matrices and which is globally convergent. Experimentally, we show that the method is computationally efficient, that it is no less accurate than the best currently employed optimization methods, and that it outperforms all tested methods in robustness to outliers. Chien-Ping Lu, Silicon Graphics Inc. cplu@engr.sgi.com y Greg Hager, Department of Computer...

This paper mathematically analyzes and proposes new solutions for the problem of estimat- ing the camera 3D location and orientation (Pose Deter'migrations) from a matched set of 3D model and 2D image landmark features. Least-squares techniques for line tokens, which minimize both rotation and translation simultaneously, are developed and shown to be far superior to the earlier techniques which solved for rotation first and then translation. However, least-squares techniques fail catastrophically when outliers (or gross errors) are present in the match data. Outliers arise frequently due to incorrect correspondences or gross errors in the 3D model. Robust techniques for pose determination are developed to handle data contaminated by fewer than 50.0 % outliers.

This paper presents a linear algorithm for recovering 3D affine shape and motion from line correspondences with uncalibrated affine cameras. The algorithm requires a minimum of seven line correspondences over three views. The key idea is the introduction of a one-dimensional projective camera. This converts 3D affine reconstruction of "line directions" into 2D projective reconstruction of "points". In addition, a line-based factorisation method is also proposed to handle redundant views. Experimental results both on simulated and real image sequences validate the robustness and the accuracy of the algorithm.

AbstractÐThe determination of camera position and orientation from known correspondences of 3D reference points and their images is known as pose estimation in computer vision and space resection in photogrammetry. It is wellknown that from three corresponding points there are at most four algebraic solutions. Less appears to be known about the cases of four and five corresponding points. In this paper, we propose a family of linear methods that yield a unique solution to 4- and 5-point pose determination for generic reference points. We first review the 3-point algebraic method. Then we present our twostep, 4-point and one-step, 5-point linear algorithms. The 5-point method can also be extended to handle more than five points. Finally, we demonstrate our methods on both simulated and real images. We show that they do not degenerate for coplanar configurations and even outperform the special linear algorithm for coplanar configurations in practice. Index TermsÐPose estimation, space resection, 2D-3D image orientation, exterior orientation determination, perspective-n-point-problem, four points, five points. 1

Tracking is a very important research subject in a real-time augmented reality context. The main requirements for trackers are high accuracy and little latency at a reasonable cost. In order to address these issues, a real-time, robust, and efficient 3D modelbased tracking algorithm is proposed for a “video see through ” monocular vision system. The tracking of objects in the scene amounts to calculating the pose between the camera and the objects. Virtual objects can then be projected into the scene using the pose. Here, nonlinear pose estimation is formulated by means of a virtual visual servoing approach. In this context, the derivation of point-to-curves interaction matrices are given for different 3D geometrical primitives including straight lines, circles, cylinders, and spheres. A local moving edges tracker is used in order to provide real-time tracking of points normal to the object contours. Robustness is obtained by integrating an M-estimator into the visual control law via an iteratively reweighted least squares implementation. This approach is then extended to address the 3D model-free augmented reality problem. The method presented in this paper has been validated on several complex image sequences including outdoor environments. Results show the method to be robust to occlusion, changes in illumination, and mistracking.

Abstract. Recently, DeMenthon and Davis (1992, 1995) proposed a method for determining the pose of a 3-D object with respect to a camera from 3-D to 2-D point correspondences. The method consists of iteratively improving the pose computed with a weak perspective camera model to converge, at the limit, to a pose estimation computed with a perspective camera model. In this paper we give an algebraic derivation of DeMenthon and Davis ’ method and we show that it belongs to a larger class of methods where the perspective camera model is approximated either at zero order (weak perspective) or first order (paraperspective). We describe in detail an iterative paraperspective pose computation method for both non coplanar and coplanar object points. We analyse the convergence of these methods and we conclude that the iterative paraperspective method (proposed in this paper) has better convergence properties than the iterative weak perspective method. We introduce a simple way of taking into account the orthogonality constraint associated with the rotation matrix. We analyse the sensitivity to camera calibration errors and we define the optimal experimental setup with respect to imprecise camera calibration. We compare the results obtained with this method and with a non-linear optimization method.

In this paper we present a method for optimally estimating the rotation and translation between a camera and a 3-D object from point and/or line correspondences. First we devise an error function and second weshowhowto minimize this error function. The quadratic nature of this function is made possible by representing rotation and translation with a dual number quaternion. We provide a detailed account of the computational aspects of a trust-region optimization method. This method compares favourably with Newton's method which has extensively been used to solve the problem at hand, with Faugeras-Toscani's linear method [6] for calibrating a camera, and with the Levenberg-Marquardt non-linear optimization method. Finally we present some experimental results which demonstrate the robustness of our method with respect to image noise and matching errors.