Image motion estimation-convergence and error analysis

The paper computes the reliability of estimates of image motion parameters. The use of such measures of reliability to weight motion estimates improves significantly the performance of motion analysis tasks such as the recovery of 3D structure (see Irani, M. and Anandan, R., ECCV, vol.1, p.539-53, 2000; Aguiar, P.M.Q. and Moura, J.M.F., IEEE ICIP, vol.1, p.549-52, 2000). The paper relates both the estimation error variance and the stability of the estimation algorithm with the spatial gradient of the image brightness pattern. We illustrate the predictions of our expressions with several image brightness patterns.