Motion from the Frontier of Curved Surfaces

of a curved surface is the envelope of contour generators showing the boundary, at least locally, of the visible region swept out under viewer motion. In general, the outlines of curved surfaces (apparent contours) from di erent viewpoints are generated by di erent contour generators on the surface and hence do not provide a constraint on viewer motion. We show that points, however, have projections which correspond to a real point on the surface and can be used to constrain viewer motion by the epipolar constraint. We show how to recover viewer motion from frontier points for both continuous and discrete motion, calibrated and uncalibrated cameras. We present preliminary results of an iterative scheme to recover the epipolar line structure from real image sequences using only the outlines of of curved surfaces. A statistical evaluation is also performed to estimate the stability of the solution. frontier