Information Fusion for Improved Motion Estimation

Abstract

studentship award number 98318229Motion Estimation is an important research field with many commercial applications including surveillance, navigation, robotics, and image compression. As a result, the field has received a great deal of attention and there exist a wide variety of Motion Estimation techniques which are often specialised for particular problems. The relative performance of these techniques, in terms of both accuracy and of computational requirements, is often found to be data dependent, and no single technique is known to outperform all others for all applications under all conditions. Information Fusion strategies seek to combine the results of different classifiers or sensors to give results of a better quality for a given problem than can be achieved by any single technique alone. Information Fusion has been shown to be of benefit to a number of applications including remote sensing, personal identity recognition, target detection, forecasting, and medical diagnosis. This thesis proposes and demonstrates that Information Fusion strategies may also be applied to combine the results of different Motion Estimation techniques in order to give more robust, more accurate and more timely motion estimates than are provided by any of the individual techniques alone. Information Fusion strategies for combining motion estimates are investigated and developed. Their usefulness is first demonstrated by combining scalar motion estimates of the frequency of rotation of spinning biological cells. Then the strategies are used to combine the results from three popular 2D Motion Estimation techniques, chosen to be representative of the main approaches in the field. Results are presented, from both real and synthetic test image sequences, which illustrate the potential benefits of Information Fusion to Motion Estimation applications. There is often a trade-off between accuracy of Motion Estimation techniques and their computational requirements. An architecture for Information Fusion that allows faster, less accurate techniques to be effectively combined with slower, more accurate techniques is described. This thesis describes a number of novel techniques for both Information Fusion and Motion Estimation which have potential scope beyond that examined here. The investigations presented in this thesis have also been reported in a number of workshop, conference and journal papers, which are listed at the end of the document