Solving orientation duality for 3D circular features using monocular vision

Abstract

Methods for estimating the 3D orientation of circular features from a single image result in at least two solutions, of which only one corresponds to the actual orientation of the object. In this paper we propose two new methods for solving this orientation duality problem using a single image. Our first method estimates the resulting ellipse projections in 2D space for the given solutions, then matches them against the image ellipse to infer the true orientation. The second method compares solutions from two co-planar circle features with different centre points, to identify their mutual true orientation. Experimental results show the robustness and the effectiveness of our methods for solving the duality problem, and perform better than state-of-art methods.</p