Constrained, globally optimal, multi-frame motion estimation

We address the problem of estimating the relative motion between the frames of a video sequence. In comparison with the commonly applied pairwise image registration methods, we consider global consistency conditions for the overall multi-frame motion estimation problem, which is more accurate. We review the recent work on this subject and propose an optimal framework, which can apply the consistency conditions as both hard constraints in the estimation problem, or as soft constraints in the form of stochastic (Bayesian) priors. The framework is applicable to virtually any motion model and enables us to develop a robust approach, which is resilient against the effects of outliers and noise. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is confirmed by a super-resolution application on synthetic and real data sets.