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International Conference on Scale-Space Theories in Computer Vision

Scale-Space 2005: Scale Space and PDE Methods in Computer Vision pp 279–290Cite as

Discontinuity-Preserving Computation of Variational Optic Flow in Real-Time

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNIP,volume 3459))

Abstract

Variational methods are very popular for optic flow computation: They yield dense flow fields and perform well if they are adapted such that they respect discontinuities in the image sequence or the flow field. Unfortunately, this adaptation results in high computational complexity. In our paper we show that it is possible to achieve real-time performance for these methods if bidirectional multigrid strategies are used. To this end, we study two prototypes: i) For the anisotropic image-driven technique of Nagel and Enkelmann that results in a linear system of equations we derive a regular full multigrid scheme. ii) For an isotropic flow-driven approach with total variation (TV) regularisation that requires to solve a nonlinear system of equations we develop a full multigrid strategy based on a full approximation scheme (FAS). Experiments for sequences of size 160 × 120 demonstrate the excellent performance of the proposed numerical schemes. With frame rates of 6 and 12 dense flow fields per second, respectively, both implementations outperform corresponding modified explicit schemes by two to three orders of magnitude. Thus, for the first time ever, real-time performance can be achieved for these high quality methods.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Mathematical Image Analysis Group, Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science, Building 27.1, Saarland University, 66041, Saarbrücken, Germany

    Andrés Bruhn & Joachim Weickert

  2. Computer Vision, Graphics, and Pattern Recognition Group, Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Mannheim, 68131, Mannheim, Germany

    Timo Kohlberger & Christoph Schnörr

Authors
  1. Andrés Bruhn
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  2. Joachim Weickert
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  3. Timo Kohlberger
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  4. Christoph Schnörr
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Dept. of Computer Science, Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, 32000, Haifa, Israel

    Ron Kimmel

  2. School of Mathematical Sciences, Tel Aviv University, 69978, Tel Aviv, Israel

    Nir A. Sochen

  3. Mathematical Image Analysis Group, Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science, Saarland University, Building E1.1, 66041, Saarbrücken, Germany

    Joachim Weickert

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© 2005 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Bruhn, A., Weickert, J., Kohlberger, T., Schnörr, C. (2005). Discontinuity-Preserving Computation of Variational Optic Flow in Real-Time. In: Kimmel, R., Sochen, N.A., Weickert, J. (eds) Scale Space and PDE Methods in Computer Vision. Scale-Space 2005. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 3459. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/11408031_24

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/11408031_24

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-25547-5

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-32012-8

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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