3D orientation tracking with UKF
Posted on August, 25th, 2014
Problem Statement
The objective of the project is to use the noisy signals from an IMU
containing a 3 axis gyroscope and a 3 axis accelerometer to obtain a
robust estimate of the orientation of an object rotated in 3D space
and using the orientation to stitch a panoramic image of the photos
taken by a camera mounted on the object. We are also provided ground
truth of the orientations from a Vicon system.
Description of approach
I smoothed out the raw signals from the accelerometer to reduce
the high frequency noise and then removed the bias from all the
input signals. I multiplied the appropriate sensitivities to the
signals which I obtained by comparing the signals with the ground
truth from the Vicon data. I implemented Unscented Kalman
Filters(UKF), to obtain the orientation of the image which is in
the form of a rotation matrix, from which one can extract the
roll, pitch and yaw angles. Using these angles I pasted the
images, in the appropriate position on a large canvas, initially
without any transformation and then considering only about the
image plane. Both the techniques work only near the center of the
canvas. Throughout the project I referred to the equations on the
" Quaternion-based Unscented Kalman Filter for Orientation
Tracking" paper by Edgar Kraft, University of Bonn.