INVESTIGATIONS OF MULTIGRID ALGORITHMS FOR THE ESTIMATION OF OPTICAL-FLOW FIELDS IN IMAGE SEQUENCES

K. P. Horn and B. G. Schunck formulated the estimation of optical flow fields as a minimization problem. In order to avoid problems with the in general smoothness constraint, H. -H. Nagel developed the 'oriented smoothness constraint'. Here, a modified formulation of this 'oriented smoothness constraint' compared to an earlier one. The differences between these formulations are discussed analytically. Starting with an iterative solution approach for the system of nonlinear partial differential equations resulting from the 'oriented smoothness constraint', the iterative solution approach is improved significantly using multigrid methods. Results obtained from experiments with real world image sequences are presented.