On the Computation of Motion from a Sequence of Monocular or Stereo Images — An Overview

Abstract

Vision and the ability to discern change due to motion are almost universal in the animal kingdom. Moving objects and changing environment surround us. Even stationary objects appear to have (relative) motion because of our own motion or the movement of our eyes. Thus, it is not at all surprising that several distinct types of investigators with widely differing backgrounds and objectives are pursuing research into motion. These backgrounds include psychophysics, neurophysiology, computer vision, computer graphics, and robotics. Briefly, psychophysicists’ and neurophysiologists’ interest in motion centers around understanding the part of biological visual system which senses and interprets motion. Researchers in computer graphics are concerned with the generation of images and, in particular, the generation of moving images and animation on a screen. Researchers in computer vision are interested in the analysis, processing, and understanding of images. A substantial fraction of these researchers are dedicated to the analysis, processing, and understanding of sequences or collections of images with the objective of collecting information from the set as a whole that may not be obtained from any one image by itself. Detection, computation, and understanding of motion are an integral part of these endeavors. Robotics is another discipline where researchers are intimately involved with motion. The current research scene using motion as the common element presents an interesting symbiosis between the disciplines cited above.