Detection and tracking of moving objects from a moving platform in presence of strong parallax

We present a novel approach to detect and track independently moving regions in a 3D scene observed by a moving camera in the presence of strong parallax. Detected moving pixels are classified into independently moving regions or parallax regions by analyzing two geometric constraints: the commonly used epipolar constraint, and the structure consistency constraint. The second constraint is implemented within a "plane+parallax" framework and represented by a bilinear relationship which relates the image points to their relative depths. This newly derived relationship is related to trilinear tensor, but can be enforced into more than three frames. It does not assume a constant reference plane in the scene and therefore eliminates the need for manual selection of reference plane. Then, a robust parallax filtering scheme is proposed to accumulate the geometric constraint errors within a sliding window and estimate a likelihood map for pixel classification. The likelihood map is integrated into our tracking framework based on the spatio-temporal joint probability data association filter (JPDAF). This tracking approach infers the trajectory and bounding box of the moving objects by searching the optimal path with maximum joint probability within a fixed size of buffer. We demonstrate the performance of the proposed approach on real video sequences where parallax effects are significant.