A monocular pose estimation system based on infrared LEDs

Abstract

We present an accurate, efficient, and robust pose estimation system based on infrared LEDs. They are mounted on a target object and are observed by a camera that is equipped with an infrared-pass filter. The correspondences between LEDs and image detections are first determined using a combinatorial approach and then tracked using a constant-velocity model. The pose of the target object is estimated with a P3P algorithm and optimized by minimizing the reprojection error. Since the system works in the infrared spectrum, it is robust to cluttered environments and illumination changes. In a variety of experiments, we show that our system outperforms state-of-the-art approaches. Furthermore, we successfully apply our system to stabilize a quadrotor both indoors and outdoors under challenging conditions. We release our implementation as open-source software.