Observer motion estimation and control from optical flow

The information conveyed by optical flow is analytically linked to the observer motion in this paper by decomposing the optical flow field into its vector field components. It is shown that the observer may recover his ego-motion by interpreting the decomposed optical flow field, and he may further utilize his mobility to actively control the shape of the optical flow field, which directly reflects the surface shape of the object. The information of surface geometry discontinuity can be derived more directly from optical flow field by segmenting the whole field. A new method for the segmentation is proposed here, which combines both the magnitude and phase parts of the optical flow. The integration of these two different kinds of information proves to be effective in making various surface geometry boundary explicit.