Extraction of Singular Points from Dense Motion Fields: An Analytic Approach

Abstract

In this paper we propose a new method to extract the vortices, sources, and sinks from the dense motion field preliminary estimated between two images of a fluid video. This problem is essential in meteorology for instance to identify and track depressions or convective clouds in satellite images. The knowledge of such points allows in addition a compact representation of the flow which is very useful in both experimental and theoretical fluid mechanics. The method we propose here is based on an analytic representation of the flow. This approach has the advantage of being robust, simple, fast and requires few parameters.