Real-time motion analysis with linear-programming

A method to compute motion models in real time from point-to-line correspondences using linear programming is presented. Point-to-line correspondences are the most reliable motion measurements given the aperture effect, and it is shown how they can approximate other motion measurements as well. Using an L₁ error measure for image alignment based on point-to-line correspondences and minimizing this measure using linear programming, achieves results which are more robust than the commonly used L₂ metric. While estimators based on L₁ are not theoretically robust, experiments show that the proposed method is robust enough to allow accurate motion recovery in hundreds of consecutive frames. The entire computation is performed in real-time on a PC with no special hardware.