Optical Flow Estimation of Large Displacements from Real Sequential Images

In computing the optical flow. Horn and Schunck's method which is a representative algorithm is based on differentiation. But it is difficult to estimate the velocity for a large displacement by this algorithm. To cope with this problem multigrid method has been proposed. In this paper, we have proposed a scaled multigrid algorithm which the initial flow for a level is calculated by the summation of the optimally scaled flow and error flow. The optimally scaled flow is the scaled expanded flow of the previous level, which can generate an estimated second image having the least RMS error with respect to the original second image, and the error flow is the flow between the estimated second image (generated by the optimally scaled flow) and the original second image. The flow for this level is then estimated using the original first and second images and the initial flow for that level. From among the various coarsest starting levels of the multigrid algorithm, we select the one that finally gives the best estimated flow. Better results were achieved using our proposed method compared with Horn and Schunck's method and a conventional multigrid algorithm.