Active tracking strategy for monocular depth inference over multiple frames

The extraction of depth information from a sequence of images is investigated. An algorithm that exploits the constraint imposed by active motion of the camera is described. Within this framework, in order to facilitate measurement of the navigation parameters, a constrained egomotion strategy was adopted in which the position of the fixation point is stabilized during the navigation (in an anthropomorphic fashion). This constraint reduces the dimensionality of the parameter space without increasing the complexity of the equations. A further distinctive point is the use of two sampling rates: the faster (related to the computation of the instantaneous optical flow) is fast enough to allow the local operator to sense the passing edge (or, in other words, to allow the tracking of moving contour points), while the slower (used to perform the triangulation procedure necessary to derive depth) is slow enough to provide a sufficiently large baseline for triangulation. Experimental results on real image sequences are presented