Recovery of ego-motion using image stabilization

A method for computing the 3D camera motion (the ego-motion) in a static scene is introduced, which is based on computing the 2D image motion of a single image region directly from image intensities. The computed image motion of this image region is used to register the images so that the detected image region appears stationary. The resulting displacement field for the entire scene between the registered frames is affected only by the 3D translation of the camera. After canceling the effects of the camera rotation by using such 2D image registration, the 3D camera translation is computed by finding the focus-of-expansion in the translation-only set of registered frames. This step is followed by computing the camera rotation to complete the computation of the ego-motion. The presented method avoids the inherent problems in the computation of optical flow and of feature matching, and does not assume any prior feature detection or feature correspondence