Review of the 3D reconstruction technology based on optical flow of monocular image sequence

The research on 3D motion estimation and structure reconstruction of the object or scene based on the monocular image sequence optical flow is important in computer vision, image processing and pattern recognition, and the research achievements are applied in many fields. such as robot vision, unmanned aerial vehicle(UAV) navigation, driver assistance system, medical image analysis, and so on. Firstly, the research progress of the technologies of the monocular image sequence optical flow estimation and 3D reconstruction is reviewed and analyzed from the aspects of accuracy and robustness. Secondly, the test image sequences of Middlebury database are employed to make comparison among the optical flow methods of HS, LDOF, CLG-TV, SOF, AOFSCNN and Classic+NL, and the direct and indirect reconstruction methods of Adiv, RMROF, Sekkati and DMDPOF based on optical flow are compared. Through the comparison results, the advantages and disadvantages of the methods are pointed out, and the characteristics and applications of the methods are generalized. Finally, the limitations and robustness of the models of optical flow estimation and 3D reconstruction in brightness changing, non-rigid motion, motion occlusion and blur are summarized, and the solutions by the fractional order differential model, non-local constraint, stereo vision and depth cue are presented. © 2016, Chinese Institute of Electronics. All right reserved.