Special issue on spatial coherence for visual motion analysis

The analysis of visual motion is fundamental in computer vision and image understanding. To date we do not have techniques for generating simple descriptions of commonplace image sequences, including the identification and representation of moving objects. Recent research has demonstrated successful methods for egomotion estimation under challenging conditions, as well as the recovery of scene structure when objects in the field of view are sufficiently large and textured and viewed against an otherwise rigid scene. Such techniques can now support a range of interesting tasks including navigation and localization. Nevertheless, we still have not developed the tools to reliably determine what parts of the image correspond to coherently moving objects in situations where there are multiple moving objects, non-rigidity, and significant appearance variations. As a result, the computation of stable descriptions of image sequences in terms of coherent, moving objects remains an elusive goal. This special issue grew out of the International Workshop on Spatial Coherence for Visual Motion Analysis, held in conjunction with ECCV 2004 in Prague. There were 33 participants in attendance to enjoy the eleven oral presentations given at the workshop. The best papers from the workshop, along with a large number of new submissions, were considered for this issue. We include five papers here, presenting new ideas on visual motion analysis: