SAMP: Shape and Motion Priors for 4D Vehicle Reconstruction

Inferring the pose and shape of vehicles in 3D from a movable platform still remains a challenging task due to the projective sensing principle of cameras, difficult surface properties, e.g. reflections or transparency, and illumination changes between images. In this paper, we propose to use 3D shape and motion priors to regularize the estimation of the trajectory and the shape of vehicles in sequences of stereo images. We represent shapes by 3D signed distance functions and embed them in a low-dimensional manifold. Our optimization method allows for imposing a common shape across all image observations along an object track. We employ a motion model to regularize the trajectory to plausible object motions. We evaluate our method on the KITTI dataset and show state-of-the-art results in terms of shape reconstruction and pose estimation accuracy.