Direct Estimation of Structure and Motion from Multiple Frames

Abstract

This paper presents a method for the estimation of scene structure and camera motion from a sequence of images. This approach achieves fundamental improvements over existing methods in the following respects: (1) No computation of optical flow or feature correspondence is required. Structure and motion are obtained directly from gradients of image brightness; (2) The method processes image sequences of arbitrary length and exploits the inherent redundancy for a significant reduction in error over time; and (3) No restrictions or assumptions are made about the camera motion or the the surface structure. Both quantities are fully recovered using this method. Our method combines the direct motion vision approach of Horn, Weldon and Negahdaripour with the theory of recursive estimation. Most importantly: it really works and we show results on a variety of real image sequences. Keywords: Structure estimation; Kalman filters; Artificial intelligence.

Open PDF

Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Mar 01, 1990
Accession Number
ADA223903

Entities

People

  • Joachim Heel

Organizations

  • Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Air Platforms
  • Materials and Manufacturing Processes

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Algorithms
  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Brightness
  • Computations
  • Computer Vision
  • Coordinate Systems
  • Equations
  • Estimators
  • Grids
  • Kalman Filtering
  • Kalman Filters
  • Mathematical Filters
  • Maximum Likelihood Estimation
  • Military Research
  • Random Variables
  • Relative Motion
  • Statistical Analysis

Fields of Study

  • Engineering

Readers

  • Adaptive Control and Estimation with Uncertainty in Dynamic Systems.
  • Computer Vision.

Technology Areas

  • AI & ML
  • AI & ML - Machine Learning Algorithms