IN PARTNERSHIP WITH: Institut national de recherche en sciences et technologies pour l’environnement et l’agriculture

Abstract — Selecting optimal models and hyper-parameters is crucial for accurate optic-flow estimation. This paper provides a solution to the problem in a generic Bayesian framework. The method is based on a conditional model linking the image intensity function, the unknown velocity field, hyper-parameters and the prior and likelihood motion models. Inference is performed on each of the three-level of this so-defined hierarchical model by maximization of marginalized a posteriori probability distribution functions. In particular, the first level is used to achieve motion estimation in a classical a posteriori scheme. By marginalizing out the motion variable, the second level enables to infer regularization coefficients and hyper-parameters of non-Gaussian M-estimators commonly used in robust statistics. The last level of the hierarchy is used for selection of the likelihood and prior motion models conditioned to the image data. The

Abstract. This work is concerned with the ill-posed inverse problem of estimating turbulent flows from the observation of an image sequence. From a Bayesian perspective, a divergence-free isotropic fractional Brownian motion (fBm) is chosen as a prior model for instantaneous turbulent velocity fields. This self-similar prior characterizes accurately second-order statistics of velocity fields in incompressible isotropic turbulence. Nevertheless, the associated maximum a posteriori involves a fractional Laplacian operator which is delicate to implement in practice. To deal with this issue, we propose to decompose the divergent-free fBm on well-chosen wavelet bases. As a first alternative, we propose to design wavelets as whitening filters. We show that these filters are fractional Laplacian wavelets composed with the Leray projector. As a second alternative, we use a divergence-free wavelet basis, which takes implicitly into account the incompressibility constraint arising from physics. Although the latter decomposition involves correlated wavelet coefficients, we are able to handle this dependence in practice. Based on these two wavelet decompositions, we finally provide effective and efficient algorithms to approach the maximum a posteriori. An intensive numerical evaluation proves the relevance of the proposed wavelet-based self-similar priors. Key words. Bayesian estimation, fractional Brownian motion, divergence-free wavelets, fractional Laplacian, connection coefficients, fast transforms, optic-flow, isotropic turbulence. AMS subject classifications. 60G18, 60G22, 60H05, 62F15, 65T50, 65T60 1. Introduction. This