In this paper we show that a classic optical ow technique by Nagel and Enkelmann (1986) can be regarded as an early anisotropic diusion method with a diusion tensor. We introduce three improvements into the model formulation that (i) avoid inconsistencies caused by centering the brightness term and the smoothness term in dierent images, (ii) use a linear scale-space focusing strategy from coarse to ne scales for avoiding convergence to physically irrelevant local minima, and (iii) create an energy functional that is invariant under linear brightness changes. Applying a gradient descent method to the resulting energy functional leads to a system of diusion{reaction equations. We prove that this system has a unique solution under realistic assumptions on the initial data, and we present an ecient linear implicit numerical scheme in detail. Our method creates ow elds with 100 % density over the entire image domain, it is robust under a large range of parameter variations, and it c...

Many differential methods for the recovery of the optic flow field from an image sequence can be expressed in terms of a variational problem where the optic flow minimizes some energy. Typically, these energy functionals consist of two terms: a data term, which requires e.g. that a brightness constancy assumption holds, and a regularizer that encourages global or piecewise smoothness of the flow field. In this paper we present a systematic classification of rotation invariant convex regularizers by exploring their connection to diffusion filters for multichannel images. This taxonomy provides a unifying framework for data-driven and flow-driven, isotropic and anisotropic, as well as spatial and spatio-temporal regularizers. While some of these techniques are classic methods from the literature, others are derived here for the first time. We prove that all these methods are well-posed: they posses a unique solution that depends in a continuous way on the initial data. An interesting structural relation between isotropic and anisotropic flow-driven regularizers is identified, and a design criterion is proposed for constructing anisotropic flow-driven regularizers in a simple and direct way from isotropic ones. Its use is illustrated by several examples.

Nonlinear diffusion processes can be found in many recent methods for image processing and computer vision. In this article, four applications are surveyed: nonlinear diffusion filtering, variational image regularization, optic flow estimation, and geodesic active contours. For each of these techniques we explain the main ideas, discuss theoretical properties and present an appropriate numerical scheme. The numerical schemes are based on additive operator splittings (AOS). In contrast to

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In this paper we address multiple motion analysis from the standpoint of orientation analysis.