Structure and Motion From Line Segments

A new method has been developed for recovering the three dimensional structure of a scene composed of straight line segments using the image data obtained from a moving camera. The recovery algorithm is formulated in terms of an objective function which measures the total squared distance in the image plane between the observed edge segments and the projections (perspective) of the reconstructed lines. This objective function is minimized with respect to the line parameters and the camera positions to obtain an estimate for the structure of the scene. The effectiveness of this approach has been demonstrated quantitatively through extensive simulations and qualitatively with actual image sequences. The implementation is publicly available.

Here are three examples of applying the structure from motion algorithm: Click on the figure for more information.

The Eli Cube

A stack of blocks

A Hallway Scene

Related Publications

• Structure and Motion from Line Segments in Multiple Images
  C. J. Taylor and D. J. Kriegman
  IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, Vol: 17, No: 11, November 1995
  [ pdf ] [ bib ]
• Minimization on the Lie Group SO(3) and Related Manifolds
  C. J. Taylor and D. J. Kriegman
  Center for Systems Science, Dept. of Electrical Engineering, Yale University, Tech Report 9405, 1994
  [ pdf ] [ bib ]
• Structure and Motion from Line Segments in Multiple Images
  C. J. Taylor and D. Kriegman
  IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, May 1992
  [ bib ]