An accurate and adaptive optical flow estimation algorithm

In this paper we present a very accurate algorithm for computing optical flow with non-uniform brightness variations. The proposed algorithm is based on a generalized dynamic image model (GDIM) in conjunction with a regularization framework to cope with the problem of non-uniform brightness variations. To alleviate flow constraint errors due to image aliasing and noise, we employ a reweighted least-squares method to suppress unreliable flow constraints, thus leading to robust estimation of optical flow. In addition, a dynamic smoothness adjustment scheme is proposed to efficiently suppress the smoothness constraint in the vicinity of the motion and brightness variation discontinuities, thus preserving motion boundaries. To efficiently minimize the resulting energy function for optical flow computation, we apply an incomplete Cholesky preconditioned conjugate gradient algorithm to solve the large linear system. Experimental results on some synthetic and real image sequences show that the proposed algorithm outperforms most existing techniques reported in literature in terms of accuracy in optical flow computation with 100 % density.