3D structure from 2D motion

Abstract

This article motivates the structure from motion (SfM) approaches by describing some current practical applications. This is followed by a brief discussion of the background of the field. Then, several techniques are outlined that show various important approaches and paradigms to the SfM problem. Critical issues, advantages and disadvantages are pointed out. Subsequently, we present our SfM approach for recursive estimation of motion, structure, and camera geometry in a nonlinear dynamic system framework. Results are given for synthetic and real images. These are used to assess the accuracy and stability of the technique. We then discuss some practical and real-time applications we have encountered and the reliability and flexibility of the approach in those settings. Finally, we conclude with results from an independent evaluation study conducted by industry where the proposed SfM algorithm compared favorably to alternative approaches.