Motion Stereo—Longitudinal Motion

Longitudinal motion stereo sinfers depth information from a forward or backward motion, and consequently is particularly useful in autonomous robot navigation applications. Most existing algorithms have some problems associated with the location of the FOE, and with the camera and surface orientations. These problems limit their applicability to real scenes. It is highly desirable to develop an efficient and practical algorithm to infer depth information from longitudinal motion. In this chapter, we present a neural network-based algorithm for longitudinal motion stereo. The algorithm allows the camera to move along its optical axis forward or backward, and requires no information on the FOE. It produces multiple dense disparity fields and recovers the depth map very efficiently.