Exploiting Discontinuities in Optical Flow

  • Authors:
  • William B. Thompson

  • Affiliations:
  • Department of Computer Science, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT 84112. E-mail: thompson@cs.utah.edu

  • Venue:
  • International Journal of Computer Vision
  • Year:
  • 1998

Quantified Score

Hi-index 0.00

Visualization

Abstract

Most optical flow estimation techniques have substantial difficultiesdealing with flow discontinuities. Methods which simultaneously detectflow boundaries and use the detected boundaries to aid in flowestimation can produce significantly improved results. Currentapproaches to implementing these methods still have importantlimitations, however. We demonstrate three such problems: errors dueto the mixture of image properties across boundaries, an intrinsicambiguity in boundary location when only short sequences areconsidered, and difficulties insuring that the motion of a boundaryaids in flow estimation for the surface to which it is attached withoutcorrupting the flow estimates for the occluded surface on the otherside. The first problem can be fixed by basing flow estimation only onimage changes at edges. The second requires an analysis of longer timeintervals. The third can be aided by using a boundary detectionmechanism which classifies the sides of boundaries as occluding andoccluded at the same time as the boundaries are detected.