Constraints for the Early Detection of Discontinuity from Motion

Surface discontinuities are detected in a sequence of images by exploiting physical constraints at early stages in the processing of visual motion. To achieve accurate early discontinuity detection we exploit five physical constraints on the presence of discontinuities: i) the shape of the sum of squared differences (SSD) error surface in the presence of surface discontinuities; ii) the change in the shape of the SSD surface due to relative surface motion; iii) distribution of optic flow in a neighborhood of a discontinuity; iv) spatial consistency of discontinuities; V) temporal consistency of discontinuities. The constraints are described, and experimental results on sequences of real and synthetic images are presented. The work has applications in the recovery of environmental structure from motion and in the generation of dense optic flow fields.