When we physically interact with our environment using our hands, we touch objects and force them to move: contact and motion are defining properties of manipulation. In this paper, we present an active, bottom-up method for the detection of actor-object contacts and the extraction of moved objects and their motions in RGBD videos of manipulation actions. At the core of our approach lies non-rigid registration: we continuously warp a point cloud model of the observed scene to the current video frame, generating a set of dense 3D point trajectories. Under loose assumptions, we employ simple point cloud segmentation techniques to extract the actor and subsequently detect actor-environment contacts based on the estimated trajectories. For each such interaction, using the detected contact as an attention mechanism, we obtain an initial motion segment for the manipulated object by clustering trajectories in the contact area vicinity and then we jointly refine the object segment and estimate its 6DOF pose in all observed frames. Because of its generality and the fundamental, yet highly informative, nature of its outputs, our approach is applicable to a wide range of perception and planning tasks. We qualitatively evaluate our method on a number of input sequences and present a comprehensive robot imitation learning example, in which we demonstrate the crucial role of our outputs in developing action representations plans from observation.
This paper is the first to review the scene flow estimation field, which analyzes and compares methods, technical challenges, evaluation methodologies and performance of scene flow estimation. Existing algorithms are categorized in terms of scene representation, data source, and calculation scheme, and the pros and cons in each category are compared briefly. The datasets and evaluation protocols are enumerated, and the performance of the most representative methods is presented. A future vision is illustrated with few questions arisen for discussion. This survey presents a general introduction and analysis of scene flow estimation. This paper presents the first method to compute dense scene flow in real-time for RGB-D cameras. It is based on a variational formulation where brightness constancy and geometric consistency are imposed. Accounting for the depth data provided by RGB-D cameras, regularization of the flow field is imposed on the 3D surface (or set of surfaces) of the observed scene instead of on the image plane, leading to more geometrically consistent results. The minimization problem is efficiently solved by a primal-dual algorithm which is implemented on a GPU, achieving a previously unseen temporal performance. Several tests have been conducted to compare our approach with a state-of-the-art work (RGB-D flow) where quantitative and qualitative results are evaluated. Moreover, an additional set of experiments have been carried out to show the applicability of our work to estimate motion in real-time. Results demonstrate the accuracy of our approach, which outperforms the RGB-D flow, and which is able to estimate heterogeneous and non-rigid motions at a high frame rate. 3-D motion estimation is a fundamental problem that has far-reaching implications in robotics. A scene flow formulation is attractive as it makes no assumptions about scene complexity, object rigidity, or camera motion. RGB-D cameras provide new information useful for computing dense 3-D flow in challenging scenes. In this work we show how to generalize two-frame variational 2-D flow algorithms to 3-D. We show that scene flow can be reliably computed using RGB-D data, overcoming depth noise and outperforming previous results on a variety of scenes. We apply dense 3-D flow to rigid motion segmentation.  In this paper we propose an efficient solution to jointly estimate the camera motion and a piecewise-rigid scene flow from an RGB-D sequence. The key idea is to perform a two-fold segmentation of the scene, dividing it into geometric clusters that are, in turn, classified as static or moving elements. Representing the dynamic scene as a set of rigid clusters drastically accelerates the motion estimation, while segmenting it into static and dynamic parts allows us to separate the camera motion (odometry) from the rest of motions observed in the scene. The resulting method robustly and accurately determines the motion of an RGB-D camera in dynamic environments with an average runtime of 80 milliseconds on a multi-core CPU. The code is available for public use test. We propose a novel joint registration and segmentation approach to estimate scene flow from RGB-D images. Instead of assuming the scene to be composed of a number of independent rigidly-moving parts, we use non-binary labels to capture non-rigid deformations at transitions between the rigid parts of the scene. Thus, the velocity of any point can be computed as a linear combination (interpolation) of the estimated rigid motions, which provides better results than traditional sharp piecewise segmentations. Within a variational framework, the smooth segments of the scene and their corresponding rigid velocities are alternately refined until convergence. A K-means-based segmentation is employed as an initialization, and the number of regions is subsequently adapted during the optimization process to capture any arbitrary number of independently moving objects. We evaluate our approach with both synthetic and real RGB-D images that contain varied and large motions. The experiments show that our method estimates the scene flow more accurately than the most recent works in the field, and at the same time provides a meaningful segmentation of the scene based on 3D motion. Scene flow is defined as the motion field in 3D space, and can be computed from a single view when using an RGBD sensor. We propose a new scene flow approach that exploits the local and piecewise rigidity of real world scenes. By modeling the motion as a field of twists, our method encourages piecewise smooth solutions of rigid body motions. We give a general formulation to solve for local and global rigid motions by jointly using intensity and depth data. In order to deal efficiently with a moving camera, we model the motion as a rigid component plus a non-rigid residual and propose an alternating solver. The evaluation demonstrates that the proposed method achieves the best results in the most commonly used scene flow benchmark. Through additional experiments we indicate the general applicability of our approach in a variety of different scenarios.