The intrinsic structure of optic flow incorporating measurement duality

The purpose of this article is to define optic flow for scalar and density images without using a priori knowledge other than its defining conservation principle, and to incorporate measurement duality, notably the scale-space paradigm, It is argued that the design of optic flow based applications may benefit from a manifest separation between factual image structure on the one hand, and goal-specific details and hypotheses about image flow formation on the other. The approach is based on a physical symmetry principle known as gauge invariance, Data-independent models can be incorporated by means of admissible gauge conditions, each of which may single out a distinct solution, but all of which must be compatible with the evidence supported by the image data. The theory is illustrated by examples and verified by simulations, and performance is compared to several techniques reported in the literature.