Efficient computation of optical flow using the census transform

Abstract

This paper presents an approach for the estimation of visual motion over an image sequence in real-time. A new algorithm is proposed which solves the correspondence problem between two images in a very efficient way. The method uses the Census Transform as the representation of small image patches. These primitives are matched using a table based indexing scheme. We demonstrate the robustness of this technique on real-world image sequences of a road scenario captured from a vehicle based on-board camera. We focus on the computation of the optical flow. Our method runs in real-time on general purpose platforms and handles large displacements. © Springer-Verlag 2004.