Shape from Dynamic Texture for Planes

Abstract

We propose a method for recovering the affine geometry of a dynamically textured plane from a video sequence taken by an uncalibrated, fixed, perspective camera. Some instances of approximately planar surfaces that are coated with a dynamic texture include large water bodies, (such as lakes and oceans), heavy traffic, dense crowds, escalators, and foliage in the wind. Under the assumption of translational dynamic textures, we propose a direct algorithm for the estimation of the inter-frame elation that does not require explicit identification of texels or movetons. In addition, we develop a general algorithm for recovering the affine geometry of homogeneous dynamic textures by identifying a constraint on the expected values of motion magnitudes. We report experimental results on several real videos of dynamic texture found in the world.