Finite element method for determination of optical flow

Abstract In this paper the application of the finite element method is presented to compute the optical flow field. Using this approach homogeneous areas are roughly triangulated. And vice versa, a fine partition at motion boundaries ensures a flow field with high resolution. This drastically reduces the computational effort without loss of accuracy. We will describe the adaptation of the image partition to the variance of the gray level gradients as well as the basic steps for solving the variational problem. Experimental results are presented using synthetic and natural image sequences. Finally, the approach is compared to results computed by the finite difference method (grid method), used up to now.

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