Direct Estimation of Motion and Extended Scene Structure from a Moving Stereo Rig

We describe a new method for motion estimation and 3D reconstruction from stereo image sequences obtained by a stereo rig moving through a rigid world. We show that given two stereo pairs, one can compute the motion of the stereo rig directly from the image derivatives (spatial and temporal). Correspondences are not required. One can then use the images from both pairs combined, to compute a dense depth map. The motion estimates between stereo pairs enable us to combine depth maps from all the pairs in the sequence to form an extended scene reconstruction. We show results from a real image sequence. The motion computation is a linear least squares computation using all the pixels in the image. Areas with little or no contrast are implicitly weighted less, so one does not have to explicitly apply a con dence measure. Copyright c Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1995 This report describes research done at the Arti cial Intelligence Laboratory of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Support for this research was provided in part by the Advanced Research Projects Agency of the Department of Defense under O ce of Naval Research contract N00014-94-01-0994. G.S. would like acknowledge the nancial support from ONR contracts N00014-94-1-0128 and DARPA contracts N00014-94-01-0994, N00014-97-0363 A.S. wishes acknowledge the nancial support from US-IS Binational Science Foundation 94-00120/2, the European ACTS project AC074 \Vanguard", and from DARPA through ARL Contract DAAL01-97-0101.