Undelayed Initialization Using Dual Channel Vision for Ego-Motion in Power Line Inspection

This paper presents a novel approach to the initialization of an ego-motion estimation technique for autonomous power line inspection. Dual channel vision, consisting of an infrared and optical camera, is typically adopted during inspection. The infrared camera is far more proficient at reliably detecting heated regions of the power tower which can be regarded as a prior relationship between the tower and cameras. Using the infrared camera, which is equipped parallel to the optical camera, an incomplete correspondence between the optical image and a 3D CAD model is established. Depending on the degree of correspondence, the initial pose of the CAD model in the optical image is estimated through two stages of coarse-to-fine estimation. The primary contributions of this paper include: 1) using dual vision for partial initialization; 2) incorporating two-stage algorithms to estimate an accurate pose quickly; 3) implementing an algorithm which functions correctly regardless of the motion blur or background texture. Experimental results consistently show that the initial pose can be estimated efficiently and robustly.