A multi-camera 6-DOF pose tracker

Most of the work in head-pose tracking has concentrated on single-camera systems with a relatively small field of view which have limited accuracy because features are only observed in a single viewing direction. We present a multicamera pose tracker that handles an arbitrary configuration of cameras rigidly fixed to the observer's head. By using multiple cameras, we increase the robustness and accuracy by which a 6-DOF pose is tracked. However, in a multicamera rig setting, earlier methods for determining the unknown pose from three world-to-camera correspondences are no longer applicable. We present a RANSAC (M. Fischler and R. Bolles, 1981) based method that handles multicamera rigs by using a fast nonlinear minimization step in each RANSAC round.