Robust Feature Extraction and Matching for Omnidirectional Images

International audienceThis paper presents a new and robust method for extracting and match- ing visual vertical features between images taken by an omnidirectional camera. Matching robustness is achieved by creating a descriptor which is unique and dis- tinctive for each feature. Furthermore, the proposed descriptor is invariant to ro- tation. The robustness of the approach is validated through real experiments with a wheeled robot equipped with an omnidirectional camera. We show that vertical lines are very well extracted and tracked during the robot motion. At the end, we also present an application of our algorithm to the robot simultaneous localization and mapping in an unknown environment