A nonlinear multigrid diffusion model for efficient dense optical flow estimation

This paper presents a nonlinear multigrid isotropic diffusion model to estimate 2D dense motion. Multigrid provides an efficient multi-level nonlinear relaxation method that accelerates the evolution process of the nonlinear isotropic diffusion model. The resulting system of the two coupled nonlinear isotropic diffusion equations, for the two components of the optical flow, is successively transferred to coarser levels, and coarse-grid correction scheme is used to improve the performance. At each level, the Gauss-Seidel Newton method is used for nonlinear relaxation. Experimental results on both synthetic and real image sequences are reported to demonstrate the efficiency and accuracy of the proposed model.