Frequency domain estimation of 3-D rigid motion based on range and intensity data

Video-rate registered range and intensity data are at reach of current sensor technology. This wealth of data can be profitably exploited in order to estimate rigid motion parameters as the approaches to 3-D motion estimation, based on the optical flow of both types of data, indicate. This work introduces an alternative for 3-D motion estimation based on the Fourier transform of the 3-D intensity function implicitly described by the registered time-sequences of range and intensity data. The proposed procedure can lead to an unsupervised method for 3-D rigid motion estimation. This method has several advantages related to the fact that it uses the total available information and not sets of features. With respect to memory occupancy the use of a time-sequence of a 3-D intensity function represents a considerable data reduction with respect to a pair of time-sequences of 2-D functions. The proposed technique, which extends to the 3-D case previous frequency domain estimation algorithms developed for the planar case, retain their robustness