Simplifying motion and structure analysis using planar parallax and image warping

Robust 3D motion and structure computation and segmentation has been the subject of an enormous body of work in reconstructive vision. For linear approximations to perspective projection (weak/para perspective), and for the case of image velocities, elegant linear methods have been devised for robust estimation. For reconstruction under arbitrary view transformations, linear projective methods using point correspondences have been suggested. In this paper, the authors present a formulation for 3D motion and structure analysis using motion parallax defined with respect to an arbitrary plane in the environment. It is shown that if an image coordinate system is warped using plane projective transformation with respect to a reference view, the residual image motion is dependent only on the epipoles and has a simple relation to the 3D structure. The author´s computational scheme avoids point/line correspondence and is based on hierarchical estimation and image warping working directly with spatio-temporal image intensities. Results on real images demonstrate how this analysis simplifies ego and multiple motion analysis, and stable scene-centered 3D reconstruction