Fast and automatic city-scale environment modelling using hard and/or weak constrained bundle adjustments

Dorra Larnaout, Vincent Gay-Bellile, Steve Bourgeois, Michel Dhome

Abstract: To provide high-quality augmented reality service in a car navigation system, accurate 6 degrees of freedom (DoF) localization is required. To ensure such accuracy, most current vision-based solutions rely on an off-line large-scale modelling of the environment. Nevertheless, while existing solutions to model the environment require expensive equipments and/or a prohibitive computation time, we propose in this paper a complete framework that automatically builds an accurate large-scale database of landmarks using only a standard camera, a low-cost global positioning system (GPS) and a geographic information system (GIS). As illustrated in the experiments, only few minutes are required to model large-scale environments. The resulting databases can then be used by an on-line localization algorithm to ensure high-quality augmented reality experiences.