Image Reconstruction Error for Optical Flow

First, we examined a number of methods to perform forward and backward image reconstruction using optical ow. Given an image and its optical ow, we used these methods to generate the next image in the sequence. The RMS diierences between the actual next images and their reconstructed versions for 3 synthetic image sequences, for which the correct ows were known, allowed us to determine which of our reconstruction methods performed their task well. Second, we examined the suitability of using good image reconstruction methods as an error metric for optical ow elds computed from image sequences for which the correct ow is unknown. Again, the RMS diierences between the actual next images and their reconstructed versions, which were created using the ows computed by one of 4 well known optical ow methods, were recovered for both the set of synthetic and a set of 4 real image sequences. RMS error was found to be a good indicator of optical ow error for the better reconstruction methods.