Abstract

The increasing importance of outdoor applications such as driver assistance systems or video surveillance tasks has recently triggered the development of optical flow methods that aim at performing robustly under uncontrolled illumination. Most of these methods are based on patch-based features such as the normalized cross correlation, the census transform or the rank transform. They achieve their robustness by locally discarding both absolute brightness and contrast. In this paper, we follow an alternative strategy: Instead of discarding potentially important image information, we propose a novel variational model that jointly estimates both illumination changes and optical flow. The key idea is to parametrize the illumination changes in terms of basis functions that are learned from training data. While such basis functions allow for a meaningful representation of illumination effects, they also help to distinguish real illumination changes from motion-induced brightness variations if supplemented by additional smoothness constraints. Experiments on the KITTI benchmark show the clear benefits of our approach. They do not only demonstrate that it is possible to obtain meaningful basis functions, they also show state-of-the-art results for robust optical flow estimation. Document type: Part of book or chapter of book

Abstract

Today's stereo vision algorithms and computing technology allow real-time 3D data analysis, for example for driver assistance systems. A recently developed Semi-Global Matching (SGM) approach by H. Hirschmuller became a popular choice due to performance and robustness. This paper evaluates different parameter settings for SGM, and its main contribution consists in suggesting to include a second order prior into the smoothness term of the energy function. It also proposes and tests a new cost function for SGM. Furthermore, some preprocessing (edge images) proved to be of great value for improving SGM stereo results on real-world sequences, as previously already shown by S. Guan and R. Klette for belief propagation. There is also a performance gain for engineered stereo data (e.g.) as currently used on the Middlebury stereo website. However, the fact that results are not as impressive as on the .enpeda.. sequences indicates that optimizing for engineered data does not neccessarily improve real world stereo data analysis. Document type: Part of book or chapter of book