Real-time optical flow estimation

The gradient-based methods for optical flow estimation are based on a constraint equation which is defined for each image pixel. The structure of the constraint equation makes the problem ill-posed so in the past some solutions have been proposed based on regularization. Under the assumption that in the immediate neighbourhood of a pixel the optical flow field is smooth, the constraint equations in that neighbourhood should have a common solution, in this case the problem is not ill-posed. Following this reasoning, an algorithm for evaluating the optical flow, which is suitable for parallel implementation is proposed in this paper. Moreover, parallel implementations of selected algorithms from the literature, for optical flow estimation, are presented in this paper with the intention of comparing their complexity and performance with respect to the proposed approach on a Connection Machine-2.<>