An Approach to 3D Object Localization Based on Monocular Vision

Reconstruction of 3D objects from a single view image is generally an ill-posed problem because of the projection distortion. A monocular vision based 3D object localization method is proposed in this paper, which approximates an object on the ground to a simple bounding solid and works automatically without any prior information about the object. A spherical or cylindrical object determined based on a circularity measure is approximated to a bounding cylinder, while the other general free-shaped objects to a bounding box or a bounding cylinder appropriately. For a general object, its silhouette on the ground is first computed by back-projecting its projected image in image plane onto the ground plane and then a base rectangle on the ground is determined by using the intuition that touched parts of the object on the ground should appear at lower part of the silhouette. The base rectangle is adjusted and extended until a derived bounding box from it can enclose the general object sufficiently. Height of the bounding box is also determined enough to enclose the general object. When the general object looks like a round-shaped object, a bounding cylinder that encloses the bounding box minimally is selected instead of the bounding box. A bounding solid can be utilized to localize a 3D object on the ground and to roughly estimate its volume. Usefulness of our approach is presented with experimental results on real image objects and limitations of our approach are discussed.