Motion and structure from one dimensional optical flow

This paper is based on the observation that if the viewing camera is appropriately mounted on a vehicle which moves on a planar surface, the problem of motion and structure recovery from optical flow becomes linear and, in principle, can be solved locally. It is shown that angular velocity and depth can be computed from one component only of the optical flow, and that the accuracy in the estimation of depth from the vertical component is more accurate than that from the horizontal component. Experiments on synthetic and real sequences support the presented analysis.