This paper presents a method for scene flow estimation from a calibrated stereo image sequence. The scene flow contains the 3-D displacement field of scene points, so that the 2-D optical flow can be seen as a projection of the scene flow onto the images. We propose to recover the scene flow by coupling the optical flow estimation in both cameras with dense stereo matching between the images, thus reducing the number of unknowns per image point. The use of a variational framework allows us to properly handle discontinuities in the observed surfaces and in the 3-D displacement field. Moreover our approach handles occlusions both for the optical flow and the stereo. We obtain a partial differential equations system coupling both the optical flow and the stereo, which is numerically solved using an original multiresolution algorithm. Whereas previous variational methods were estimating the 3-D reconstruction at time t and the scene flow separately, our method jointly estimates both in a single optimization. We present numerical results on synthetic data with ground truth information, and we also compare the accuracy of the scene flow projected in one camera with a state-of-the-art single-camera optical flow computation method. Results are also presented on a real stereo sequence with large motion and stereo discontinuities. Source code and sample data are available for the evaluation of the algorithm.
A more recent approach is that of REF , which couples dense stereo matching with optical flow estimation-this involves a set of partial differential equations which are solved numerically.
A Variational Method for Scene Flow Estimation from Stereo Sequences
2007 IEEE 11th International Conference on Computer Vision
2007 IEEE 11th International Conference on Computer Vision
Computer Science