Distortion-Robust Spherical Camera Motion Estimation via Dense Optical Flow

Abstract

Conventional techniques for frame-to-frame camera motion estimation rely on tracking a set of sparse feature points. However, images taken from spherical cameras have high distortion which can induce mistakes in feature point tracking, offsetting the advantage of their large fields-of-view. Hence, in this research, we attempt a novel approach of using dense optical flow for distortion-robust spherical camera motion estimation. Dense optical flow incorporates smoothing terms and is free of local outliers. It encodes the camera motion as well as dense 3D information. Our approach decomposes dense optical flow into epipolar geometry and the dense disparity map, and reprojects this disparity map to estimate 6 DoF camera motion. The approach handles spherical image distortion in a natural way. We experimentally demonstrate its accuracy and robustness.