Estimating 3D Scene Flow from Multiple 2D Optical Flows

Abstract

Scene flow is the motion of the surface points in the 3D world. For a camera, it is seen as a 2D optical flow in the image plane. Knowing the scene flow can be very useful as it gives an idea of the surface geometry of the objects in the scene and how those objects are moving. Four methods for calculating the scene flow given multiple optical flows have been explored and detailed in this paper along with the basic mathematics surrounding multi-view geometry. It was found that given multiple optical flows it is possible to estimate the scene flow to different levels of detail depending on the level of prior information present.