Multi-view 3D Reconstruction of a Scene Containing Independently Moving Objects

In this thesis, the structure from motion problem for calibrated scenes containing independently moving objects (IMO) has been studied. For this purpose, the overall reconstruction process is partitioned into various stages. The first stage deals with the fundamental problem of estimating structure and motion by using only two views. This process starts with finding some salient features using a sub-pixel version of the Harris corner detector. The features are matched by the help of a similarity and neighborhood-based matcher. In order to reject the outliers and estimate the fundamental matrix of the two images, a robust estimation is performed via RANSAC and normalized 8-point algorithms. Two-view reconstruction is finalized by decomposing the fundamental matrix and estimating the 3D-point locations as a result of triangulation. The second stage of the reconstruction is the generalization of the two-view algorithm for the N-view case. This goal is accomplished by first reconstructing an initial framework from the first stage and then relating the additional views by finding correspondences between the new view and already reconstructed views. In this way, 3D-2D projection pairs are determined and the projection matrix of this new view is estimated by using a robust procedure. The final section deals with scenes containing IMOs. In order to reject the correspondences due to moving objects, parallax-based rigidity constraint is used. In utilizing this constraint, an automatic background pixel selection algorithm is developed and an IMO rejection algorithm is also proposed. The results of the proposed algorithm are compared against that of a robust outlier rejection algorithm and found to be quite promising in terms of execution time vs. reconstruction quality.