Speed estimation for scene objects using stereo visual odometry methods

This paper proposes a novel method to determine the speed of the surrounding vehicles in traffic scenarios. Relying on the video information obtained from a stereo camera mounted on a moving vehicle, we first determine the vehicle ego motion based on static scene features then we determine the relative motion between objects based on features situated on the moving objects. For robustness to false feature matches everything is plugged into a multi-RANSAC framework. The novelty of the method consist in the fact that the relative motion between the objects can be determined with the same algorithm that was previously used for ego motion estimation, the only difference consisting in the geometric constraints that are imposed to the subset of point features considered for inliers set detection and evaluation. Also, the proposed method does not rely on the fact that objects are detected previously and it does not detect the objects.