A local relaxation method for optical flow estimation

Abstract

Abstract The application of the local relaxation (LR) method to the optical flow estimation has been shown to provide much better performance than the Gauss-Seidel method. However, the direct application of the existing LR method results in a relatively slow convergence because of the coupling of the Poisson equations in which optical flow estimation problem is framed. This paper presents modification of the LR method based on the decoupling of the Poisson equations resulting in a fast convergence. This speed up in convergence is more noticeable when the proposed method is combined with registered gradients such as displaced frame difference and motion compensated spatial gradients. The paper includes simulation results on artificial and real image sequences verifying the superiority of the proposed modification.