Uncertainty-Driven Dense Two-View Structure From Motion Academic Article uri icon

abstract

  • This work introducesan effective and practical solution to the dense two-view structure from motion (SfM) problem. One vital question addressed is how to mindfully use per-pixel optical flow correspondence betweentwo frames for accurate pose estimationas perfect per-pixel correspondence between two images is difficult, if not impossible, to establish. With the carefully estimated camera pose and predicted per-pixel optical flow correspondences, a dense depth of the scene is computed. Later, an iterative refinement procedure is introduced to further improve optical flow matching confidence, camera pose, and depth, exploiting their inherent dependency in rigid SfM. The fundamental idea presented is to benefit from per-pixel uncertainty in the optical flow estimation and provide robustness to the dense SfM system via an online refinement. Concretely, we introduce a pipeline consisting of (i) an uncertainty-aware dense optical flow estimation approach that provides per-pixel correspondence with their confidence score of matching; (ii) a weighted dense bundle adjustment formulation that depends on optical flow uncertainty and bidirectional optical flow consistency to refine both pose and depth; (iii) A depth estimation network that considers its consistency with the estimated poses and optical flow respecting epipolar constraint. Extensive experiments show that the proposed approach achieves remarkable depth accuracy and state-of-the-art camera pose results superseding SuperPoint and SuperGlue accuracy when tested on benchmark datasets such as DeMoN, YFCC100 M, and ScanNet.

published proceedings

  • IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters

author list (cited authors)

  • Chen, W., Kumar, S., & Yu, F.

citation count

  • 4

complete list of authors

  • Chen, Weirong||Kumar, Suryansh||Yu, Fisher

publication date

  • March 2023