Calibration and three-dimensional reconstruction with a photorealistic simulator based on the omnidirectional vision system

Abstract

Recent advancements in deep learning require a large amount of the annotated training data containing various terms and conditions of the environment. Thus, developing and testing algorithms for the navigation of mobile robots can be expensive and time-consuming. Motivated by the aforementioned problems, this article presents a photorealistic simulator for the computer vision community working with omnidirectional vision systems. Built using unity, the simulator integrates sensors, mobile robots, and elements of the indoor environment and allows one to generate synthetic photorealistic data sets with automatic ground truth annotations. With the aid of the proposed simulator, two practical applications are studied, namely extrinsic calibration of the vision system and three-dimensional reconstruction of the indoor environment. For the proposed calibration and reconstruction techniques, the processes themselves are simple, robust, and accurate. Proposed methods are evaluated experimentally with data generated by the simulator. The proposed simulator and supporting materials are available online: http://www.ilabit.org .