Haussecker, H.W. and Fleet, D.J.
Estimating optical flow with physical models of brightness variation.
IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 23(6):661-673, 2001

ABSTRACT
Although brightness constancy is commonly assumed by optical flow techniques, it is well-known that this produces poor estimates of image motion under many conditions. This paper describes a generalized formulation of optical flow estimation based on models of brightness variation that have time-dependent physical causes. These include changing surface orientation with respect to a directional illuminant, motion of the illuminant, and physical models of heat transport in infrared images. With these models we simultaneously estimate the optical flow and the relevant physical parameters. The estimation problem is formulated using total least squares (TLS), with confidence bounds on the parameters. Experiments are shown in four domains with both synthetic and natural inputs.
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