Understanding vehicle motion via spatial integration of intensities

On a moving vehicle, speedy motion extraction from video is demanded. Different from the traditional motion estimation methods that track or match 2D features in consecutive motion-blurred images, this work explores a novel approach to find motion without explicit shape analysis. We take spatial integration of intensities in each frame and the obtained consecutive profiles provide distinct motion traces in a visual form. The camera motion can be followed in the integrated images briefly, rather than from complex feature extraction and iterative computation. The resulting motion parameters are used for normalizing length and removing shaking of route panoramas. The results are robust and the method is particularly efficient for real time processing.