Method and system for constraint-consistent motion estimation

Abstract

A method for determining motion vectors from one point in one image frame of a scene to corresponding points in at least two other image frames of the scene, wherein the frames are obtained in a capture process utilizing one or more cameras, wherein the method employs an iterative and hierarchical dense motion estimation that computes the geometry-consistent and appearance-consistent motion fields between three images simultaneously by enforcing both a trilinear constraint and a constant-brightness constraint. This method includes the steps of: providing first, second and third images of a scene under perspective projection with unconstrained motion of the camera, wherein points (x′,y′) and (x″,y″) in the second and third frames are projections of the same spatial points (x,y) in the first frame; specifying a system of trifocal tensors and optical flow equations that describe point correspondence across the three images; and applying both a geometric constraint of trilinearity and an appearance constraint of constant brightness, thereby utilizing a trilinear constraint and a constant brightness constraint to obtain the pointwise displacement between the three frames simultaneously.

Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.