Nearly there ?

At the risk of jinxing myself completely I think I am nearly at the point where my vision system is correctly calculating camera ego motion! Now if that didn't make you excited it should because it is very very cool.

I managed to spend a bit of time hacking on the weekend and made a huge amount of progress. Now that I have identified what I suspect (but haven't yet confirmed) are libsifts short comings and moved to using Lowe's example binary to extract SIFT features things are starting to work. The matching algorithm I was using to match features between stereo images and between frames was also a bit broken, so I ported Lowe's example matching algorithm from C to C# and that greatly improved matching performance. So now I have one bug to squash and ego motion calculations will be working. I'm pretty sure I know where the problem lies so hopefully I'll get that nailed in the next day or two.

At that point I will have one remaining task before I can declare phase one complete. I still have to figure out how to use the camera extrinsic parameters to give more accuracy to the stereo triangulation calculations. At that point the system will be able to accurately build a map of SIFT features observed in it's environment, and simultaneously localise itself within that environment.