Abstract

This paper describes the design and implementation of an active sur- face reconstruction algorithm for two-frame image sequences using passive im- aging. A novel strategy based on the statistical grouping of image gradient fea- tures is used. It is shown that the gradient of the intensity in an image can suc- cessfully be used to drive the direction of the viewer ’s motion. As such, an in- creased efficiency in the accumulation of information is demonstrated through a significant increase in the convergence rate of the depth estimator (3 to 4 times for the presented results) over traditional passive depth-from-motion. The view- er is considered to be restricted to a short baseline. A maximal-estimation framework is adopted to provide a simple approach for propagating information in a bottom-up fashion in the system. A Kalman filtering scheme is used for ac- cumulating information temporally. The paper provides results for real-textured data to support the findings.