A General Framework and New Alignment Criterion for Dense Optical Flow

The problem of dense optical flow computation is addressed from a variational viewpoint. A new geometric framework is introduced. It unifies previous art and yields new efficient methods. Along with the framework a new alignment criterion suggests itself. It is shown that the alignment between the gradients of the optical flow components and between the latter and the intensity gradients is an important measure of the flow’s quality. Adding this criterion as a requirement in the optimization process improves the resulting flow. This is demonstrated in synthetic and real sequences.