Guide to Three Dimensional Structure and Motion Factorization

The problem of structure and motion recovery from image sequences is an important theme in computer vision. Considerable progress has been made in this field during the past two decades, resulting in successful applications in robot navigation, augmented reality, industrial inspection, medical image analysis, and digital entertainment, among other areas. However, many of these methods work only for rigid objects and static scenes. The study of non-rigid structure from motion is not only of academic significance, but also has important practical applications in real-world, nonrigid or dynamic scenarios, such as human facial expressions and moving vehicles.

This practical guide/reference provides a comprehensive overview of Euclidean structure and motion recovery, with a specific focus on factorization-based algorithms. The book discusses the latest research in this field, including the extension of the factorization algorithm to recover the structure of non-rigid objects, and presents some new algorithms developed by the authors. Readers require no significant knowledge of computer vision, although some background on projective geometry and matrix computation would be beneficial.