An Integrated Approach to 3-D Motion Analysis and Object Recognition

In this paper, an integrated system for three-dimensional (3-D) motion estimation and object recognition with outdoor stereo image sequences as inputs is presented. The scene contains stationary background with a moving vehicle. The goals are to obtain the 3-D motion description and the identification of the vehicle from the input stereo images. In order to accomplish the desired goals, the system consists of four stages: 1) motion estimation, 2) distinctive feature extraction, 3) model database, and 4) object recognition. The results of 3-D motion estimation are used to considerably narrow down the search space in the stage of object recognition. The system is applied to eight sets of stereo image pairs. Experimental results demonstrate that the system can successfully provide the 3-D motion description and the identification of the vehicle in all the stereo image pairs.