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Front. Inform. Technol. Electron. Eng.  2011, Vol. 12 Issue (12): 1010-1020    DOI: 10.1631/jzus.C1100062
    
Robust optical flow estimation based on brightness correction fields
Wei Wang*,1, Zhi-xun Su*,1, Jin-shan Pan1, Ye Wang2, Ri-ming Sun1
1 School of Mathematical Sciences, Dalian University of Technology, Dalian 116024, China 2 Department of Mathematics, Harbin Institute of Technology, Harbin 150006, China
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Abstract  Optical flow estimation is still an important task in computer vision with many interesting applications. However, the results obtained by most of the optical flow techniques are affected by motion discontinuities or illumination changes. In this paper, we introduce a brightness correction field combined with a gradient constancy constraint to reduce the sensibility to brightness changes between images to be estimated. The advantage of this brightness correction field is its simplicity in terms of computational complexity and implementation. By analyzing the deficiencies of the traditional total variation regularization term in weakly textured areas, we also adopt a structure-adaptive regularization based on the robust Huber norm to preserve motion discontinuities. Finally, the proposed energy functional is minimized by solving its corresponding Euler-Lagrange equation in a more effective multi-resolution scheme, which integrates the twice downsampling strategy with a support-weight median filter. Numerous experiments show that our method is more effective and produces more accurate results for optical flow estimation.

Key wordsOptical flow field      Variational methods      Brightness correction fields      Median filter      Multi-resolution     
Received: 17 March 2011      Published: 30 November 2011
CLC:  TP391.4  
Cite this article:

Wei Wang, Zhi-xun Su, Jin-shan Pan, Ye Wang, Ri-ming Sun. Robust optical flow estimation based on brightness correction fields. Front. Inform. Technol. Electron. Eng., 2011, 12(12): 1010-1020.

URL:

http://www.zjujournals.com/xueshu/fitee/10.1631/jzus.C1100062     OR     http://www.zjujournals.com/xueshu/fitee/Y2011/V12/I12/1010


Robust optical flow estimation based on brightness correction fields

Optical flow estimation is still an important task in computer vision with many interesting applications. However, the results obtained by most of the optical flow techniques are affected by motion discontinuities or illumination changes. In this paper, we introduce a brightness correction field combined with a gradient constancy constraint to reduce the sensibility to brightness changes between images to be estimated. The advantage of this brightness correction field is its simplicity in terms of computational complexity and implementation. By analyzing the deficiencies of the traditional total variation regularization term in weakly textured areas, we also adopt a structure-adaptive regularization based on the robust Huber norm to preserve motion discontinuities. Finally, the proposed energy functional is minimized by solving its corresponding Euler-Lagrange equation in a more effective multi-resolution scheme, which integrates the twice downsampling strategy with a support-weight median filter. Numerous experiments show that our method is more effective and produces more accurate results for optical flow estimation.

关键词: Optical flow field,  Variational methods,  Brightness correction fields,  Median filter,  Multi-resolution 
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