A Fast Local Motion Estimation Method and Its Applications to Ultrasound Image Sequences

Multi-grid method is applied to optical flow estimation in ultrasound image sequences. The existing multigrid method is modified to accommodate the nonlinearity in the motion model. The nonlinear iteration, instead of the linear one, is proposed for the approximate solution in the finest grid. The proposed method was tested in both of panoramic imaging and the spatio-temporal noise reduction. The results showed that its performance was not distinguishable from the one-level method in spites of quite less computational burden.