Monocular Epipolar Constraint for Optical Flow Estimation

Abstract

In this paper, the usage of the monocular epipolar geometry for the calculation of optical flow is investigated. We derive the necessary formulation to use the epipolar constraint for the calculation of differential optical flow using the total variational model in a multi-resolution pyramid scheme. Therefore, we minimize an objective function which contains the epipolar constraint with a residual function based on different types of descriptors (brightness, HOG, CENSUS and MLDP). For the calculation of epipolar lines, the relevant fundamental matrices are calculated based on the 7- and 8- point methods. Moreover, SIFT and Lukas-Kanade methods are used to obtain matched features between two consecutive frames, by which fundamental matrices can be calculated. The effect of using different combination of the feature matching methods, fundamental matrix calculation and descriptors are evaluated based on the KITTI 2012 dataset.