Optical Flow From Real Images

In this paper a new method which computes the optical flow from a sequence of time-varying images is presented. The use of second order derivatives of the image brightness provides a solution to the aperture problem. Experimental results on sequences of real images, together with estimates of 3D motion parameters, like time-to-crash for translation and angular velocity for rotation, are presented and discussed. Due to the remarkable accuracy which can be achieved in estimating motion parameters, the proposed method is likely to be very useful in a number of computer vision applications.