A parallel algorithm for real-time computation of optical flow

The precise measurement of the two-dimensional field of velocities from time-varying two-dimensional images is impossible in general. It is, however, possible to compute suitable 'optical flows' that are qualitatively similar to the velocity field in most cases. We describe a simple, parallel algorithm that computes an optical flow from sequences of real images, which is consistent with human psychophysics and suggests plausible physiological models. In particular, our algorithm runs on a Connection Machine supercomputer in close-to-real time. It shows several of the same "illusions9 that are perceived by humans. A natural physiological implementation of the model is consistent with data from cortical areas V1 and MT.

[1]  B. Hassenstein,et al.  Systemtheoretische Analyse der Zeit-, Reihenfolgen- und Vorzeichenauswertung bei der Bewegungsperzeption des Rüsselkäfers Chlorophanus , 1956 .

[2]  Berthold K. P. Horn,et al.  Determining Optical Flow , 1981, Other Conferences.

[3]  E. Adelson,et al.  Phenomenal coherence of moving visual patterns , 1982, Nature.

[4]  T. Poggio,et al.  The analysis of stereopsis. , 1984, Annual review of neuroscience.

[5]  H. K. Nishihara,et al.  Practical Real-Time Imaging Stereo Matcher , 1984 .

[6]  Ellen C. Hildreth,et al.  Measurement of Visual Motion , 1984 .

[7]  Charles G. Gross,et al.  Pattern recognition mechanisms , 1985 .

[8]  V. Ramachandran,et al.  Spatial phase and frequency in motion capture of random-dot patterns. , 1985, Spatial vision.

[9]  V. Ramachandran,et al.  The perception of apparent motion. , 1986, Scientific American.

[10]  John F. Canny,et al.  A Computational Approach to Edge Detection , 1986, IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence.

[11]  M. Howells,et al.  High-resolution Fresnel zone plates for x-ray applications by spatial-frequency multiplication , 1987 .

[12]  K. Nakayama,et al.  The aperture problem—I. Perception of nonrigidity and motion direction in translating sinusoidal lines , 1988, Vision Research.

[13]  Norberto M. Grzywacz,et al.  A computational theory for the perception of coherent visual motion , 1988, Nature.

[14]  T Poggio,et al.  Parallel integration of vision modules. , 1988, Science.

[15]  Jin Luo,et al.  Computing motion using analog and binary resistive networks , 1988, Computer.