An image-interpolation technique for the computation of optic flow and egomotion

A technique for measuring the motion of a rigid, textured plane in the frontoparallel plane is developed and tested on synthetic and real image sequences. The parameters of motion — translation in two dimensions, and rotation about a previously unspecified axis perpendicular to the plane — are computed by a single-stage, non-iterative process which interpolates the position of the moving image with respect to a set of reference images. The method can be extended to measure additional parameters of motion, such as expansion or shear. Advantages of the technique are that it does not require tracking of features, measurement of local image velocities or computation of high-order spatial or temporal derivatives of the image. The technique is robust to noise, and it offers a simple, novel way of tackling the ‘aperture’ problem. An application to the computation of robot egomotion is also described.

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