Differential optical flow estimation under monocular epipolar line constraint

Abstract

In this paper, a new method is presented to use the epipolar constraint for the estimations of optical flows. We derive the necessary formulation to add the epipolar constraint in terms of optical flow components and force the components to transform points from the first frame to the next consecutive frame such that the points lie on their correspondent epipolar lines. In this work, no smoothness term is utilized and the performance of the proposed method is evaluated based only on data terms. We conducted different evaluations using two different point matching methods (SIFT and Lucas-Kanade) and used them in two different fundamental matrix estimation methods required to calculate epipolar line coefficients. It is demonstrated that epipolar constraint yields noticeable improvements almost in all of the cases.