A Multibody Factorization Method for Independently Moving Objects

  • Authors:
  • João Paulo Costeira;Takeo Kanade

  • Affiliations:
  • Instituto de Sistemas e Robótica, Instituto Superior Técnico, Av. Rovisco Pais, 1096 Lisboa CODEX, Portugal. E-mail: Email: jpc@isr.ist.utl.pt;Carnegie Mellon University, 5000 Forbes Av., Pittsburgh, PA 15213, USA. E-mail: Email: tk@cs.cmu.edu

  • Venue:
  • International Journal of Computer Vision
  • Year:
  • 1998

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Abstract

The structure-from-motion problem has been extensively studied inthe field of computer vision. Yet, the bulk of the existing workassumes that the scene contains only a single moving object. The morerealistic case where an unknown number of objects move in the scenehas received little attention, especially for its theoreticaltreatment. In this paper we present a new method for separating andrecovering the motion and shape of multiple independently movingobjects in a sequence of images. The method does not require priorknowledge of the number of objects, nor is dependent on any groupingof features into an object at the image level. For this purpose, weintroduce a mathematical construct of object shapes, called the shapeinteraction matrix, which is invariant to both the object motions andthe selection of coordinate systems. This invariant structure iscomputable solely from the observed trajectories of image featureswithout grouping them into individual objects. Once the matrix iscomputed, it allows for segmenting features into objects by theprocess of transforming it into a canonical form, as well asrecovering the shape and motion of each object. The theoryworks under a broad set of projection models (scaled orthography,paraperspective and affine) but they must be linear, so itexcludes projective “cameras”.