Dense semi-rigid scene flow estimation from RGBD images

Abstract: Scene flow is defined as the motion field in 3D space, and can be computed from a single view when using an RGBD sensor. We propose a new scene flow approach that exploits the local and piece-wise rigidity of real world scenes. By modeling the motion as a field of twists, our method encourages piecewise smooth solutions of rigid body motions. We give a general formulation to solve for local and global rigid motions by jointly using intensity and depth data. In order to deal efficiently with a moving camera, we model the motion as a rigid component plus a non-rigid residual and propose an alternating solver. The evaluation demonstrates that the proposed method achieves the best results in the most commonly used scene flow benchmark. Through additional experiments we indicate the general applicability of our approach in a variety of different scenarios.