Vision guiding method with monocular camera

A monocular vision guiding method for estimating the position and orientation of the camera is proposed. The motion and projection model of the camera on-board a machine system was established. A new planar target with four black squares was designed to generate the control points with the 16 vertices of the four squares. The position and orientation of the camera can be calculated with the world coordinates of the 16 control points and their corresponding image coordinates. Simulation test result shows that the proposed vision-based state estimate is accurate to within 10cm in each axis of translation and 1.4 degrees in each axis of rotation when the distance between the camera and the reference target is about 10 m and the Gaussian white noise level is 1.5 pixels. The proposed technique is robust to noise and reliable, it meets the demand of the real time measurement of the position and orientation for the machine system control. It will promote the engineering applications of vision guiding.