Stixels motion estimation without optical flow computation

Abstract

This paper presents a new approach to estimate the motion of objects seen from a stereo rig mounted on a ground mobile robot. We exploit the prior knowledge on ground plane presence and rough shape of objects, to extract a simplified world model, named stixel world. The contribution of this paper is to show that stixels motion can be estimated directly solving a single dynamic programming problem instead of an image wide optical flow computation. We compare this new method with baseline methods, show competitive results quality-wise, and a significant gain speed-wise. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.