Scanning Depth of Route Panorama Based on Stationary Blur

This work achieves an efficient acquisition of scenes and their depths along long streets. A camera is mounted on a vehicle moving along a straight or a mildly curved path and a sampling line properly set in the camera frame scans the 1D images over scenes continuously to form a 2D route panorama. This paper proposes a method to estimate the depth from the camera path by analyzing a phenomenon called stationary blur in the route panorama. This temporal blur is a perspective effect in parallel projection yielded from the sampling slit with a physical width. We analyze the behavior of the stationary blur with respect to the scene depth, vehicle path, and camera properties. Based on that, we develop an adaptive filter to evaluate the degree of the blur for depth estimation, which avoids error-prone feature matching or tracking in capturing complex street scenes and facilitates real time sensing. The method also uses much less data than the structure from motion approach so that it can extend the sensing area significantly. The resulting route panorama with depth information is useful for urban visualization, monitoring, navigation, and modeling.