The Minors of the Structure Tensor

A novel method for motion estimation from first order derivatives is presented. First estimates are obtained by evaluating the minors of the so-called structure tensor that contains blurred products of first order derivatives. The minors yield four different estimates that are equal in case of translation but differ for other spatio-temporal patterns. The mean yields a robust motion estimate and the difference is used as an indicator of discontinuous motions, occlusions, and noise. This procedure leads to a flow field with small errors and low density. An additional change detection is performed to obtain a mask that is filled with the previously computed (correct but sparse) motion vectors. The superior Performance of the algorithm is demonstrated on synthetic and real sequences by comparison with other methods.

[1]  Terry Caelli,et al.  Computation of Surface Geometry and Segmentation Using Covariance Techniques , 1994, IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell..

[2]  Erhardt Barth,et al.  Image Encoding, Labeling, and Reconstruction from Differential Geometry , 1993, CVGIP Graph. Model. Image Process..

[3]  Erhardt Barth,et al.  Direct detection of flow discontinuities by 3D curvature operators , 1991, Pattern Recognit. Lett..

[4]  Takeo Kanade,et al.  An Iterative Image Registration Technique with an Application to Stereo Vision , 1981, IJCAI.

[5]  Hans Knutsson,et al.  Signal processing for computer vision , 1994 .

[6]  Ramesh C. Jain,et al.  Motion detection in spatio-temporal space , 1989, Comput. Vis. Graph. Image Process..

[7]  Til Aach,et al.  Bayesian algorithms for adaptive change detection in image sequences using Markov random fields , 1995, Signal Process. Image Commun..

[8]  Hans-Hellmut Nagel,et al.  On the Estimation of Optical Flow: Relations between Different Approaches and Some New Results , 1987, Artif. Intell..

[9]  S. Lippman,et al.  The Scripps Institution of Oceanography , 1959, Nature.

[10]  Erhardt Barth.  Bewegung als intrinsische Geometrie von Bildfolgen , 1999, DAGM-Symposium.

[11]  Rudolf Mester,et al.  Orientation estimation: Conventional techniques and a new non-differential approach , 2000, 2000 10th European Signal Processing Conference.

[12]  Cicero Mota,et al.  Curvature operators in geometric image processing , 1999, XII Brazilian Symposium on Computer Graphics and Image Processing (Cat. No.PR00481).