Nonlinear Variational Method for Optical Flow Computation

We present a new method for optical flow computation based on the minimization of a non-quadratic functional. The solution of the obtained nonlinear differential equations is done with a time dependent approach leading to the successive solutions of linear systems. This new method allows to compute optical flow fields while insuring a unique solution and preserving the flow discontinuities. This method seems to be more appropriate since it does not enforce the optical flow to be smooth in the boundaries of moving objects and reconstruct the optical flow discontinuities without any specific processing of these points. We have applied the model on synthetical and real image sequences which illustrate the properties of this approach. Finally we give an interesting application which merges optical flow field and snake models for boundaries tracking.