This paper describes a pyramidal robust algorithm dedicated to the depth-from-motion problem (computation of the third dimension in the case of a moving monocular camera). We propose a direct method that does not require the tedious computation of optical flow. Depth is obtained from cinematic parameters and gradients of image brightness. As with many of the early vision problems, this one is ill-posed and regularization techniques are used to recover a unique stable solution. In the presence of noisy image acquisition and motion discontinuities, the estimation of optical flow is reformulated in robust estimation framework. To improve our algorithm to large motions, we use a multi-resolution scheme. Some experimental results are shown both on simulated and real images.

Date Published: 13 October 1994
PDF: 7 pages
Proc. SPIE 2354, Intelligent Robots and Computer Vision XIII: 3D Vision, Product Inspection, and Active Vision, (13 October 1994); doi: 10.1117/12.189106

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 2354:
Intelligent Robots and Computer Vision XIII: 3D Vision, Product Inspection, and Active Vision
David P. Casasent, Editor(s)