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On the Computation of Optical Flow using the 3-D Gabor Transform

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Abstract

The motion of brightness patterns in an image sequence (optical flow) is most intuitively considered as a spatiotemporal phenomenon. It has been shown, however, that motion has a characteristic signature in the spatiotemporal-frequency (Fourier) domain. This fact can be exploited for the computation of optical flow. However, for cases which involve a number of regions in a sequence with different motions, as in scenes with one or more objects moving against a stationary or moving background, the global nature of the Fourier transform makes it unsuitable for this task. The signatures of the different motions cannot be resolved in the Fourier domain, nor associated with their respective regions in the image sequence. Local frequency representations provide a means to address this problem. In this paper, we consider the application of a 3-D version of the widely used Gabor transform to the computation of optical flow.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of California, Davis, 3175 Engineering II

    Todd R. Reed

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  1. Todd R. Reed
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Reed, T.R. On the Computation of Optical Flow using the 3-D Gabor Transform. Multidimensional Systems and Signal Processing 9, 447–452 (1998). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1008431029442

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1008431029442

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