Single-Camera Trilateration

Abstract

This paper presents a single-camera trilateration scheme which estimates the instantaneous 3D pose of a regular forward-looking camera from a single image of landmarks at known positions. Derived on the basis of the classical pinhole camera model and principles of perspective geometry, the proposed algorithm estimates the camera position and orientation successively. It provides a convenient self-localization tool for mobile robots and vehicles equipped with onboard cameras. Performance analysis has been conducted through extensive simulations with representative examples, which provides an insight into how the input errors and the geometric arrangement of the camera and landmarks affect the performance of the proposed algorithm. The effectiveness of the proposed algorithm has been further verified through an experiment.