Optical flow estimation using adaptive wavelet zeroing

Motion fields of real image sequences are typically piecewise smooth with discontinuities at object boundaries. Further, because of the aperture problem, only the normal component of the optical flow can be observed. Direct application of wavelet shrinkage to the normal component flow may yield undesirable results due to the correlated noise affecting the wavelet coefficients. In this paper, we present a new technique for estimating optical flow based on L/sub 1/ regularisation. The resulting flow estimate typically has many zero wavelet coefficients, but unlike wavelet shrinkage some of the remaining coefficients are allowed to "grow". To highlight this difference, we have named our new technique wavelet zeroing. Additionally, we present a data-driven, sequence adaptive method for optimally choosing the penalty parameter.