Piecewise Rigid Scene Flow

Christoph Vogel, Konrad Schindler, Stefan Roth; Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2013, pp. 1377-1384

Estimating dense 3D scene flow from stereo sequences remains a challenging task, despite much progress in both classical disparity and 2D optical flow estimation. To overcome the limitations of existing techniques, we introduce a novel model that represents the dynamic 3D scene by a collection of planar, rigidly moving, local segments. Scene flow estimation then amounts to jointly estimating the pixelto-segment assignment, and the 3D position, normal vector, and rigid motion parameters of a plane for each segment. The proposed energy combines an occlusion-sensitive data term with appropriate shape, motion, and segmentation regularizers. Optimization proceeds in two stages: Starting from an initial superpixelization, we estimate the shape and motion parameters of all segments by assigning a proposal from a set of moving planes. Then the pixel-to-segment assignment is updated, while holding the shape and motion parameters of the moving planes fixed. We demonstrate the benefits of our model on different real-world image sets, including the challenging KITTI benchmark. We achieve leading performance levels, exceeding competing 3D scene flow methods, and even yielding better 2D motion estimates than all tested dedicated optical flow techniques.