Detecting motion independent of the camera movement through a log-polar differential approach

Abstract

This paper is concerned with a differential motion detection technique in log-polar coordinates which allows object motion tracking independently of the camera ego-motion when camera focus is along the movement direction. The method does not use any explicit estimation of the motion field, which can be calculated afterwards at the moving points. The method, previously formulated in Cartesian coordinates, uses the log-polar coordinates, which allows the isolation of the object movement from the image displacement due to certain camera motions. Experimental results on a sequence of real images are included, in which a moving object is detected and optical flow is calculated in log-polar coordinates only for the points of the object.