I’m finally making progress on my Vision project again. After spending a couple of months trying to figure out how to do nonlinear least squares minimisation I think it is now working. I still have quite a bit of testing to do before I am sure it is giving sensible results but so far it looks good. I couldn’t have gotten this working without the tireless help of Robin Hewitt who (via the Seattle Robotics Society mailing list) coached me through the process.

I have now returned to the beginning of the project again. Before I go any further I have decided to rework what I have done so far. My understand of computer vision concepts has come a long way since I started this project and I am sure I can improve my original code.

To that end I am writing a camera calibration application that will more accurately calibrate my camera system. This program will be able to calculate the intrinsic parameters of each camera and save and load these parameters from file. It will also be able to calculate the essential matrix of the stereo system and hence will be enable me to far more accurately match SIFT features as I will be able to include the epipolar constraint which I am currently not using.

I am hoping this calibration work will have a drastic improvement on the accuracy of the system, but only time will tell I guess.