Variational optic flow computation with a spatio-temporal smoothness constraint

Nonquadratic variational regularization is a well-known and powerful approach for the discontinuity-preserving computation of optic flow. In the present paper, we consider an extension of flow-driven spatial smoothness terms to spatio-temporal regularizers. Our method leads to a rotationally invariant and time symmetrie convex optimization problem. It has a unique minimum that can be found in a stable way by standard algorithms such as gradient descent. Since the convexity guarantees global convergence, the result does not depend on the flow initialization. An iterative algorithm is presented that is not difficult to implement. Qualitative and quantitative results for synthetic and real-world scenes show that our spatio-temporal approach (i) improves optic flow fields significantly, (ii) smoothes out background noise efficiently, and (iii) preserves true motion boundaries. The computational costs are only 50 % higher than for a pure spatial approach applied to all subsequent image pairs of the sequence

A massively parallel multi-level approach to a domain decomposition method for the optical flow estimation with varying illumination

We consider a variational method to solve the optical flow problem with varying illumination. We apply an adaptive control of the regularization parameter which allows us to preserve the edges and fine features of the computed flow. To reduce the complexity of the estimation for high resolution images and the time of computations, we implement a multi-level parallel approach based on the domain decomposition with the Schwarz overlapping method. The second level of parallelism uses the massively parallel solver MUMPS. We perform some numerical simulations to show the efficiency of our approach and to validate it on classical and real-world image sequences

Convective regularization for optical flow

We argue that the time derivative in a fixed coordinate frame may not be the most appropriate measure of time regularity of an optical flow field. Instead, for a given velocity field $v$ we consider the convective acceleration $v_t + \nabla v v$ which describes the acceleration of objects moving according to $v$. Consequently we investigate the suitability of the nonconvex functional $\|v_t + \nabla v v\|^2_{L^2}$ as a regularization term for optical flow. We demonstrate that this term acts as both a spatial and a temporal regularizer and has an intrinsic edge-preserving property. We incorporate it into a contrast invariant and time-regularized variant of the Horn-Schunck functional, prove existence of minimizers and verify experimentally that it addresses some of the problems of basic quadratic models. For the minimization we use an iterative scheme that approximates the original nonlinear problem with a sequence of linear ones. We believe that the convective acceleration may be gainfully introduced in a variety of optical flow models

Fast Super-Resolution from video data using optical flow estimation

Abstract Regularization-based and a fast non-iterative methods using optical flow estimation are suggested for video data super-resolution with correction of nonuniform illumination

Decomposition of Optical Flow on the Sphere

We propose a number of variational regularisation methods for the estimation and decomposition of motion fields on the $2$-sphere. While motion estimation is based on the optical flow equation, the presented decomposition models are motivated by recent trends in image analysis. In particular we treat $u+v$ decomposition as well as hierarchical decomposition. Helmholtz decomposition of motion fields is obtained as a natural by-product of the chosen numerical method based on vector spherical harmonics. All models are tested on time-lapse microscopy data depicting fluorescently labelled endodermal cells of a zebrafish embryo.Comment: The final publication is available at link.springer.co

High performance cluster computing with 3-D nonlinear diffusion filters

This paper deals with parallelisation and implementation aspects of PDE-based image processing models for large cluster environments with distributed memory. As an example we focus on nonlinear diffusion filtering which we discretise by means of an additive operator splitting (AOS). We start by decomposing the algorithm into small modules that shall be parallelised separately. For this purpose image partitioning strategies are discussed and their impact on the communication pattern and volume is analysed. Based on the results we develop an algorithmic implementation with excellent scaling properties on massively connected low latency networks. Test runs on a high-end Myrinet cluster yield almost linear speedup factors up to 209 for 256 processors. This results in typical denoising times of 0.5 seconds for five iterations on a 256 x 256 x 128 data cube