Probabilistic Color Optical Flow

Abstract. Usually, optical flow computation is based on grayscale images and the brightness conservation assumption. Recently, some authors have investigated in transferring gradient-based grayscale optical flow methods to color images. These color optical flow methods are restricted to brightness and color conservation over time. In this paper, a correlation-based color optical flow method is presented that allows for brightness and color changes within an image sequence. Further on, the correlation results are used for a probabilistic evaluation that combines the velocity information gained from single color frames to a joint velocity estimate including all color frames. The resulting color optical flow is compared to other representative multi-frame color methods and standard singleframe grayscale methods.