Early spatiotemporal grouping with a distributed oriented energy representation

Spatiotemporal data is associated with vast amounts of raw samples. Given the limited computational resources typically available, an initial organization of this data supporting semantically meaningful lines of inquiry would facilitate efficient processing. In this paper, a new representation for grouping raw image data into a set of coherent spacetime regions is proposed. Unique in this proposal is that coherency is related to a richer description of local spacetime structure than generally considered. In particular, the representation describes the presence of particular oriented spacetime structures in a distributed manner. A key advantage of this representation is its ability to signal the presence of multiple oriented structures at a given spacetime location. More generally, the abstraction allows for the description and grouping of motion and non-motion-related patterns in a uniform manner. Empirical evaluation of the grouping method on synthetic and challenging natural imagery suggests its efficacy.