Dense, robust, and accurate motion field estimation from stereo image sequences in real-time

Abstract

In this paper a novel approach for estimating the three dimensional motion field of the visible world from stereo image sequences is proposed. This approach combines dense variational optical flow estimation, including spatial regularization, with Kalman filtering for temporal smoothness and robustness. The result is a dense, robust, and accurate reconstruction of the three-dimensional motion field of the current scene that is computed in real-time. Parallel implementation on a GPU and an FPGA yields a vision-system which is directly applicable in real-world scenarios, like automotive driver assistance systems or in the field of surveillance. Within this paper we systematically show that the proposed algorithm is physically motivated and that it outperforms existing approaches with respect to computation time and accuracy. © 2010 Springer-Verlag.