Detecting Moving Objects With a Moving Camera by Comparing Edge Contours

This paper introduces a method for detecting moving objects in a monocular image sequence that is obtained using a moving camera. The method first estimates the motion of the edge contours in a given image frame, by recovering a transformation that best matches each edge contour with the edges in the subsequent frame. Any contour that is not well accounted for by a single transformation is split into subparts. The transformation of each edge contour together with the relative spatial locations of the contours is used to partition the image into regions with similar motions. Hypotheses about the locations of possible moving objects are then made based on these motion regions. One of the key aspects of the approach is that it is based on estimating the motion of entire edge contours, as opposed to recovering a velocity field that measures the motion of individual points. We present some examples for image sequences taken of animate objects using a hand-held video camera. Keywords: Motion estimation, motion segmentation, edge matching.