Motion estimation in colour image sequences

Abstract

Greyscale methods have long been the focus of algorithms for recovering optical flow. Yet optical flow recovery from colour images can be implemented using direct methods, i.e., without using computationally costly iterations or search strategies. The quality of recovered optical flow can be assessed and tailored after processing, providing an effective, efficient tool for motion estimation. In this chapter, a brief introduction to optical flow is presented along with the optical flow constraint equation and proposed extensions to colour images. Methods for solving these extended equations are given for dense optical flows and the results of applying these methods on two synthetic image sequences are presented. The growing need for the estimation of large-magnitude optical flows and the filtering of singularities require more sophisticated approaches such as sparse optical flow. These sparse methods are described with a sample application in the analysis of High definition video in the compressed domain.