Visual homing by robust interpolation for sparse motion flow

In this paper, we propose a visual homing method by mismatch removal and robust interpolation of sparse motion flows. First, a smoothness prior is proposed and verified by using synthetic and real panoramic images. Then a mismatch removal method is developed for panoramic images based on such smoothness prior. Finally, an interpolation function for the motion flow is obtained simultaneously as a byproduct of mismatch removal, and the focus-of-expansion or focus-of-contraction is used to determine homing directions. The proposed visual homing can be used alone. Also the mismatch removal method can be used as a pre-processing method, and integrated with any other visual homing method which depends on precious keypoints matching. The effectiveness of our method is demonstrated by a panoramic dataset for visual homing.