Monocular simultaneous multi-body motion segmentation and reconstruction from perspective views

In this paper, we tackle the problem of mapping multiple 3D rigid structures and estimating their motions from perspective views through a car-mounted camera. The proposed method complements conventional localization and mapping algorithms (such as Visual Odometry and SLAM) to estimate motions of other moving objects in addition to the vehicle´s motion. We present a theoretical framework for robust estimation of multiple motions and structures from perspective images. The method is based on the factorization of the projective trajectory matrix without explicit estimation of projective depth values. We exploit the epipolar geometry of calibrated cameras to generate several hypotheses for motion segments. Once the hypotheses are obtained, they are evaluated in an iterative scheme by alternating between estimation of 3D structures and estimation of multiple motions. The proposed framework does not require any knowledge about the number of motions and is robust to noisy image measurements. The method is evaluated on street-level sequences from a car-mounted camera. A benchmark dataset is also used to compare the results with previous works, although most of the related works use synthetic scenes simulating desktop environments.