STRUCTURE-FROM-MOTION - DETERMINING THE RANGE AND ORIENTATION OF SURFACES BY IMAGE INTERPOLATION

A new scheme is presented for determining the range and orientation of arbitrarily oriented surfaces directly from the apparent image motion captured by a moving camera. The mean range, slope, and tilt of the s urface are computed by decomposition of the image motion into componen ts representing translation, compression, and shear. These motion para meters are computed directly from intensity changes in the images by t he solution of a set of linear equations, the coefficients of which ar e derived from the raw image data by a novel process of linear image i nterpolation. The advantages of this scheme over those of existing sch emes are that (1) it involves no identification or tracking of feature s and therefore avoids the correspondence problem, (2) it does not req uire measurement of high-order spatial or temporal derivatives of the image and is therefore robust to noise, and (3) the three parameters c haracterizing the surface (mean range, slope, and tilt) are recovered in a noniterative calculation. The scheme is ideal for applications su ch as autonomous robot navigation in which information about slope and tilt can be used to determine the traversability of the surrounding t errain. (C) 1996 Optical Society of America