Method and system for segment-based optical flow estimation

Abstract

The methods and systems of the present invention enable the estimation of optical flow by performing color segmentation and adaptive bilateral filtering to regularize the flow field to achieve a more accurate flow field estimation. After creating pyramid models for two input image frames, color segmentation is performed. Next, starting from a top level of the pyramid, additive flow vectors are iteratively estimated between the reference frames by a process including occlusion detection, wherein the symmetric property of backward and forward flow is enforced for the non-occluded regions. Next, a final estimated optical flow field is generated by expanding the current pyramid level to the next lower level and the repeating the process until the lowest level is reached. This approach not only generates efficient spatial-coherent flow fields, but also accurately locates flow discontinuities along the motion boundaries.