A NONLINEAR FILTERING BASED OPTICAL FLOW COMPUTATION

A novel optical flow estimation is proposed in this paper, which addresses some issues including the credible estimation of optical flow and the prevention of over-smoothing across motion boundaries. Our main contribution is that we estimated the optical flow by a nonlinear filtering process instead of an energy minimizing process, the latter often needs the corresponding smoothing constraint to be restricted to some form of convex and differentiable entity. In this way, it avoids some restrictions needed by the regularization. So we can choose a nonlinear filter from more flexible forms, which can help to deal with flow discontinuities more efficiently in some sense. We modified and extended a scalar 2D bilateral filter to optical flow field as the wanted nonlinear filter. Qualitative and quantitative results show that the new method can produce a reliable result.