Computation of motion from stereo image sequence using the unified optical flow field

Abstract

In this paper a new approach to motion analysis from a sequence of stereo images has been proposed. Based on a four-frame model the new concept of unified optical flow field is presented. It is a generalization of the optical flow [1] to stereo imagery. A set of fundamental equations is established to characterize the unified optical flow field. Another set of equations is then derived from which 3-D motion can be reconstructed via the use of the field quantities of the unified optical flow field. Unlike the current existing techniques for motion analysis from stereo imagery the recovered motion by using this new approach is for a whole continuous field instead of only for some features . It does not need finding feature correspondence and therefore is much more efficient.