Robust Optical Flow Computation Based on Least-Median-of-Squares Regression

  • Authors:
  • E. P. Ong;M. Spann

  • Affiliations:
  • The Institute of Microelectronics, 11 Science Park Rd, Science Park II, Singapore 117685. eeping@ime.org.sg;School of Electronic and Electrical Engineering, University of Birmingham, Edgbaston, Birmingham B15 2TT, UK. M.Spann@bham.ac.uk

  • Venue:
  • International Journal of Computer Vision
  • Year:
  • 1999

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Abstract

An optical flow estimation technique is presented which isbased on the least-median-of-squares (LMedS) robust regressionalgorithm enabling more accurate flow estimates to be computed in thevicinity of motion discontinuities. The flow is computed in ablockwise fashion using an affine model. Through the use ofoverlapping blocks coupled with a block shifting strategy, redundancyis introduced into the computation of the flow. This eliminatesblocking effects common in most other techniques based on blockwiseprocessing and also allows flow to be accurately computed in regionscontaining three distinct motions.A multiresolution version of the technique is also presented, againbased on LMedS regression, which enables image sequences containinglarge motions to be effectively handled.An extensive set of quantitative comparisons with a wide range ofpreviously published methods are carried out using synthetic,realistic (computer generated images of natural scenes with knownflow) and natural images. Both angular and absolute flow errors arecalculated for those sequences with known optical flow. Displacedframe difference error, used extensively in video compression, isused for those natural scenes with unknown flow. In all of thesequences tested, a comparison with those methods that result in adense flow field (greater than 80% spatial coverage), show that theLMedS technique produces the least error irrespective of the errormeasure used.