Region-Based Optical Flow Estimation with Treatment of Occlusions

The estimation of optical flow plays a key-role in several computer vision problems, including motion detection and segmentation, frame interpolation, three-dimensional scene reconstruction, robot navigation, video shot detection, mosaicking and video compression. In this work we propose a new algorithm for computing a dense optical flow field between two or more images of a video sequence, which tackles the inherent problems of conventional optical flow algorithms. These algorithms usually show a bad performance in regions of low texture as well as near motion boundaries. We try to overcome these problems by segmenting the reference frame into regions of homogeneous color. The color segmentation incorporates the assumption that the motion inside regions of homogeneous color varies smoothly and motion discontinuities coincide with the borders of those regions. The affine motion model is used to describe the motion inside a segment. To initializ