Robust Optical Flow Estimation Using the Monocular Epipolar Geometry

Abstract

The estimation of optical flow in cases of illumination change, sparsely-textured regions or fast moving objects is a challenging problem. In this paper, we analyze the use of a texture constancy constraint based on local descriptors (i.e., HOG) integrated with the monocular epipolar geometry to estimate robustly optical flow. The framework is implemented in differential data fidelities using a total variation model in a multi-resolution scheme. Besides, we propose an effective method to refine the fundamental matrix along with the estimation of the optical flow. Experimental results based on the challenging KITTI dataset show that the integration of texture constancy constraint with the monocular epipolar line constraint and the enhancement of the fundamental matrix significantly increases the accuracy of the estimated optical flow. Furthermore, a comparison with existing state-of-the-art approaches shows better performance for the proposed approach.