Planar PØP: feature-less pose estimation with applications in UAV localization

© 20xx IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.We present a featureless pose estimation method that, in contrast to current Perspective-n-Point (PnP) approaches, it does not require n point correspondences to obtain the camera pose, allowing for pose estimation from natural shapes that do not necessarily have distinguished features like corners or intersecting edges. Instead of using n correspondences (e.g. extracted with a feature detector) we will use the raw polygonal representation of the observed shape and directly estimate the pose in the pose-space of the camera. This method compared with a general PnP method, does not require n point correspondences neither a priori knowledge of the object model (except the scale), which is registered with a picture taken from a known robot pose. Moreover, we achieve higher precision because all the information of the shape contour is used to minimize the area between the projected and the observed shape contours. To emphasize the non-use of n point correspondences between the projected template and observed contour shape, we call the method Planar PØP. The method is shown both in simulation and in a real application consisting on a UAV localization where comparisons with a precise ground-truth are provided.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

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Environment landmarks are generally employed by visual SLAM (vSLAM) methods in the form of keypoints. However, these landmarks are unstable over time because they belong to areas that tend to change, e.g., shadows or moving objects. To solve this, some other authors have proposed the combination of keypoints and artificial markers distributed in the environment so as to facilitate the tracking process in the long run. Artificial markers are special elements (similar to beacons) that can be permanently placed in the environment to facilitate tracking. In any case, these systems keep a set of keypoints that is not likely to be reused, thus unnecessarily increasing the computing time required for tracking. This paper proposes a novel visual SLAM approach that efficiently combines keypoints and artificial markers, allowing for a substantial reduction in the computing time and memory required without noticeably degrading the tracking accuracy. In the first stage, our system creates a map of the environment using both keypoints and artificial markers, but once the map is created, the keypoints are removed and only the markers are kept. Thus, our map stores only long-lasting features of the environment (i.e., the markers). Then, for localization purposes, our algorithm uses the marker information along with temporary keypoints created just in the time of tracking, which are removed after a while. Since our algorithm keeps only a small subset of recent keypoints, it is faster than the state-of-the-art vSLAM approaches. The experimental results show that our proposed sSLAM compares favorably with ORB-SLAM2, ORB-SLAM3, OpenVSLAM and UcoSLAM in terms of speed, without statistically significant differences in accuracy.This research was funded by the project PID2019-103871GB-I00 of the Spanish Ministry of Economy, Industry and Competitiveness, FEDER, Project 1380047-F UCOFEDER-2021 of Andalusia and by the European Union–NextGeneration EU for requalification of Spanish University System 2021–2023