Local estimation of high velocity optical flow with correlation image sensor

Abstract

In this article, the authors address a problem of the estimation of high velocity optical flow. When images are captured by conventional image sensors, the problem of the optical flow estimation is ill-posed if only the temporal constancy of the image brightness is the valid assumption. When given images are captured by the correlation image sensors, though, you can make the problem of the optical flow estimation well-posed under some condition and can locally estimate the unique optical flow at each pixel in each single frame. The condition though would not be satisfied when the flow velocity is high. In this article, we propose a method that can estimate the normal component of high velocity optical flow using only the local image values in each single frame. The equation used for estimating the normal velocity is theoretically derived and the condition the equation holds is also revealed. © 2014 Springer International Publishing.