A fast incremental approach for accurate measurement of the displacement field

A fast method for accurate measurement of displacement field that combines template matching and differential techniques is proposed. This method, which is able to deal with the problems of non-rigid object movement as well as large inter frame displacements, operates in three steps. First, a sparse displacement field is obtained by a classic template matching technique. Then, this information is propagated through the overall image to obtain a dense displacement field. Finally, this field is considered as approximate solution before the use of classical differential technique for optical flow estimation. To illustrate the efficiency of the proposed procedure, a number of experimental results using both synthetic and real images are presented and discussed. The results show significant improvement over those obtained using standard multigrid approaches, especially in the cases of textured, very structured images or large inter frame displacements. q 2003 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.