Robust pose estimation algorithm for approximate coplanar targets

To uniquely determine the position and orientation of a calibrated camera from a single image, pose estimation algorithms have been developed. However, the presented algorithms usually encounter pose ambiguity problem when process approximate coplanar targets, which can be defined as that a majority of object points on these targets belongs to a plane while some others distract outside the plane. Based on a more comprehensive explanation for pose ambiguity from the influence of 3D object configuration, we propose a robust pose estimation algorithm. The approximate coplanar points are divided into coplanar points and non-coplanar points. When two candidate solutions are calculated by coplanar points, final pose is determined using non-coplanar points. Simulation results and experiments on real images prove the effectiveness of our proposed pose estimation algorithm.