Large displacement optical flow for volumetric image sequences

Abstract

In this paper we present a variational optical flow algorithm for volumetric image sequences (3D + time). The algorithm uses descriptor correspondences that allow us to capture large motions. Further we describe a symmetry constraint that considers the forward and the backward flow of an image sequence to improve the accuracy of the flow field. We have tested our algorithm on real and synthetic data. Our experiments include a quantitative evaluation that show the impact of the algorithm's components. We compare a single core implementation to two parallel implementations, one on a multi-core CPU and one on the GPU. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.