Laser-Supported Monocular Visual Tracking for Natural Environments

Abstract

This paper presents and demonstrates a 2D laser-supported visual tracking solution, that can achieve reliable performance in unstructured scenes such as those seen in natural environment surveys. The method is shown to sufficiently stabilize scale and account for scale drift, as well as improve overall reliability. The suggested method is minimally invasive, does not require any additional parameter and does not necessarily require a laser, which can be replaced by any set of points with known depth, with no constraint on the temporal continuity of known points. We also test our method on 4 surveys, captured in a natural riverine environment, that proved to be challenging even for the state-of-the-art in visual tracking.