Sparse optical flow regularisation for real-time visual tracking

Optical flow can greatly improve the robustness of visual tracking algorithms. While dense optical flow algorithms have various applications, they can not be used for real-time solutions without resorting to GPU calculations. Furthermore, most optical flow algorithms fail in challenging lighting environments due to the violation of the brightness constraint. We propose a simple but effective iterative regularisation scheme for real-time, sparse optical flow algorithms, that is shown to be robust to sudden illumination changes and can handle large displacements. The algorithm proves to outperform well known techniques in real life video sequences, while being much faster to calculate. Our solution increases the robustness of a real-time particle filter based tracking application, consuming only a fraction of the available CPU power. Furthermore, a new and realistic optical flow dataset with annotated ground truth is created and made freely available for research purposes

Recent Progress in Image Deblurring

This paper comprehensively reviews the recent development of image deblurring, including non-blind/blind, spatially invariant/variant deblurring techniques. Indeed, these techniques share the same objective of inferring a latent sharp image from one or several corresponding blurry images, while the blind deblurring techniques are also required to derive an accurate blur kernel. Considering the critical role of image restoration in modern imaging systems to provide high-quality images under complex environments such as motion, undesirable lighting conditions, and imperfect system components, image deblurring has attracted growing attention in recent years. From the viewpoint of how to handle the ill-posedness which is a crucial issue in deblurring tasks, existing methods can be grouped into five categories: Bayesian inference framework, variational methods, sparse representation-based methods, homography-based modeling, and region-based methods. In spite of achieving a certain level of development, image deblurring, especially the blind case, is limited in its success by complex application conditions which make the blur kernel hard to obtain and be spatially variant. We provide a holistic understanding and deep insight into image deblurring in this review. An analysis of the empirical evidence for representative methods, practical issues, as well as a discussion of promising future directions are also presented.Comment: 53 pages, 17 figure