INTERPRETATION OF IMAGE MOTION FIELDS: A SPATIO-TEMPORAL APPROACH.

A general formulation and solution procedure for the image motion interpretation problem are described. The general problem of recovering the three-dimensional (3-D) local surface structure, motion and deformation of an opaque object from a given image flow field is considered. The method is based on the assumption of local analyticity of 3-D surface structure, motion, deformation and, consequently, the corresponding 2-D image motion in the space-time domain. In this approach both spatial and temporal information are used in a uniform way. The approach is illustrated by formulating and deriving analytic solutions to the image motion interpretation problem for many interesting cases, including some simple cases of nonrigid and nonuniform motions. More recent work has shown that this formulation leads to a unified computational approach to solving many different cases, including all cases based on image flow that have been solved previously. This approach can be extended to deal with more complicated cases.