Fast local estimation of optical flow using variational and wavelet methods

Abstract

We present a framework for fast (linear time) local estima-tion of optical flow in image sequences. Starting from the commonly used brightness constancy assumption, a simple diffierential technique is de-rived in a first step. Afterwards, this approach will be extended by the application of a nonlinear diffusion process to the flow field in order to reduce smoothing at motion boundaries. Due to the ill-posedness of the determination of optical flow from the related difierential equations, a Wavelet-Galerkin projection method is applied to regularize and lin-earize the problem.