Integration of appearance and geometric methods for the analysis of monocular sequences

We propose a real time computation of rotation and heading direction from the deformation of an active contour in the image plane as a basis to recover the epipolar geometry. The method works on sequences recorded by a freely moving calibrated camera and allows independent motions in the scene. It is different from the common techniques that compute displacement or velocity fields as the unique basis for further computation. In fact, the difficulties in determining the displacement or velocity fields make the new trend presented in this paper a very attractive alternative.