A Defocus Technique based Depth from Lens Translation using Sequential SVD Factorization

Depth recovery in robot vision is an essential problem to infer the three dimensional geometry of scenes from a sequence of the two dimensional images. In the past, many studies have been proposed for the depth estimation such as stereopsis, motion parallax and blurring phenomena. Among cues for depth estimation, depth from lens translation is based on shape from motion by using feature points. This approach is derived from the correspondence of feature points detected in images and performs the depth estimation that uses information on the motion of feature points. The approaches using motion vectors suffer from the occlusion or missing part problem, and the image blur is ignored in the feature point detection. This paper presents a novel approach to the defocus technique based depth from lens translation using sequential SVD factorization. Solving such the problems requires modeling of mutual relationship between the light and optics until reaching the image plane. For this mutuality, we first discuss the optical properties of a camera system, because the image blur varies according to camera parameter settings. The camera system accounts for the camera model integrating a thin lens based camera model to explain the light and optical properties and a perspective projection camera model to explain the depth from lens translation. Then, depth from lens translation is proposed to use the feature points detected in edges of the image blur. The feature points contain the depth information derived from an amount of blur of width. The shape and motion can be estimated from the motion of feature points. This method uses the sequential SVD factorization to represent the orthogonal matrices that are singular value decomposition. Some experiments have been performed with a sequence of real and synthetic images comparing the presented method with the depth from lens translation. Experimental results have demonstrated the validity and shown the applicability of the proposed method to the depth estimation.