Pattern Recognition Society Printed in Great Britain..pdf

Pattern Recognition, Vol. 28, No. 7, pp. 977 988, 1995 Elsevier Science Ltd Pergamon Pattern Recognition Society Printed in Great Britain. 0031 3203/95 $9.50+.00 0031-3203(94)00144-8 OPTICAL FLOW BY NONLINEAR RELAXATION C. COLOMBO,:~~ A. DEL BIMBO* and S. SANTINI* ~Arts Laboratory, Scuola Superiore SantAnne, Via G. Carducci 40, 56127 Pisa, Italy * Dipartimento di Sistemi e Informatica, Universita di Firenze, Via S. Marta 3, 50139 Firenze, Italy (Received 28 July 1993; in revisedform 23 September 1993; receivedfor publication 30 November 1994) Abstract--In this paper, we present a local approach to the computation of raw optical flow fields based on nonlinear relaxation, which is explicitly designed to be coupled with a nonlinear vector filtering technique so as to achieve an effective rejection of the outliers. We derive the approach from a standard linear algorithm the one-dimensional least squares. This is split down into two steps. First, the linear algorithm is formulated as an iterative procedure, in which image points in a suitable geometric neighborhood are made to interact each other. Second, a nonlinearity term in the elementary interaction between neighbors is added, which depends on the Gaussian interaction of elements of a velocity neighborhood. The results of a comparison with two linear local techniques show clearly the effectiveness of the approach, both in ter