Structure from motion using the ground plane constraint

Abstract

This paper concerns the interactive construction of geometric models of objects from image sequences. We show that when the objects are constrained to move on the ground plane, a simple direct SFM algorithm is possible, which is vastly superior to conventional methods. The proposed algorithm is non-iterative, and in general requires a minimum of three points in two frames. Experimental comparisons with other methods are presented in the paper. It is shown to be greatly superior to general linear SFM algorithms not only in computational cost but also in accuracy and noise robustness. It provides a practical method for modelling moving objects from monocular monochromatic image sequences.