Data-driven structure from motion using the epipolar corridor constraint

In this paper, we present a new approach to robust 3D rigid body motion estimation and scene structure recovery using an epipolar corridor. In comparison to traditional two stage approaches we do not rely on independent establishment of feature point correspondences and subsequent computation of 3D motion parameters, but iteratively feed the motion parameters back to the point correspondences and subsequent computation of 3D motion parameters, but iteratively feed the motion parameters back to the point correspondence estimator, restricting the search space to an epipolar corridor. As the iterations proceed we narrow the width of the corridor and reach a stable solution with all point correspondences obeying the epipolar line constraint. The least median of squares estimator is integrated into the 3D motion parameters estimation framework to deal with the multi-motion problem. The position of the feature points along the epipolar line finally leads to structure recovery from motion. Experimental results using real and synthetic image sequence data show the ability of the approach to robustly estimate 3D motion parameters.