Real Time Tracking of Camera Motion Through Cylindrical Passages

In this paper, we present a novel method for tracking the motion of a camera through cylindrical passages. The proposed technique is based on studying movement of feature points in the image stream captured during traversal of the camera. It applies various image-processing algorithms for analysis in an 'unrolled' domain to provide a quick estimate of camera motion. The proposed techniques have been evaluated using MATLAB on a sequence of test images and it has been shown that both the linear distance and rotation can be inferred using a small number of feature points, thereby justifying its use in real time systems.