A Direct Dense Visual Servoing Approach Using Photometric Moments

Abstract

In this paper, visual servoing based on photometric moments is advocated. A direct approach is chosen by which the extraction of geometric primitives, visual tracking and image matching steps of a conventional visual servoing pipeline can be bypassed. A vital challenge in photometric methods is the change in the image resulting from the appearance and disappearance of portions of the scene from the camera field of view during the servo. To tackle this issue, a general model for the photometric moments enhanced with spatial weighting is proposed. The interaction matrix for these spatially weighted photometric moments is derived in an analytical form. The correctness of the modeling, effectiveness of the proposed strategy in handling the exogenous regions, and improved convergence domain are demonstrated with a combination of simulation and the experimental results.