A Variational Approach for Multi-valued Velocity Field Estimation in Transparent Sequences

We propose a variational approach for multi-valued velocity field estimation in transparent sequences. Starting from existing local motion estimators, we show a variational model for integrating in space and time these local estimations to obtain a robust estimation of the multi-valued velocity field. With this approach, we can indeed estimate some multi-valued velocity fields which are not necessarily piecewise constant on a layer: Each layer can evolve according to non-parametric optical flow. We show how our approach outperforms some existing approaches, and we illustrate its capabilities on several challenging synthetic/real sequences.