Two-frame optical flow formulation in an unwarping multiresolution scheme

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a new formulation of the Differential Optical Flow Equation (DOFE) between two consecutive images considering spatial and temporal information from both. The displacement field is computed in a Markov Random Field (MRF) framework. The solution is done by minimization of the Gibbs energy using a Direct Descent Energy (DDE) algorithm. A hybrid multiresolution approach, combining pyramidal decomposition and two-step multigrid techniques, is used to estimate small and large displacements. A new pyramidal decomposition method without warping process between pyramid levels is introduced. The experiments carried out on benchmark dataset sequences show the effectiveness of the new optical flow formulation using the proposed unwarped pyramid decomposition schema. © 2009 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.