[IPOL announce] new article: Robust Discontinuity Preserving Optical Flow Methods

[announcements about the IPOL journal]

A new article is available in IPOL: http://www.ipol.im/pub/art/2016/172/

Nelson Monzón, Agustín Salgado, and Javier Sánchez,
Robust Discontinuity Preserving Optical Flow Methods,
Image Processing On Line, 6 (2016), pp. 165–182.
https://doi.org/10.5201/ipol.2016.172

Abstract
In this work, we present an implementation of discontinuity-preserving 
strategies in TV-L1 optical flow methods. These are based on exponential 
functions that mitigate the regularization at image edges, which usually 
provide precise flow boundaries. Nevertheless, if the smoothing is not 
well controlled, it may produce instabilities in the computed motion 
fields. We present an algorithm that allows three regularization 
strategies: the first one uses an exponential function together with a 
TV process; the second one combines this strategy with a small constant 
that ensures a minimum isotropic smoothing; the third one is a fully 
automatic approach that adapts the diffusion depending on the histogram 
of the image gradients. The last two alternatives are aimed at reducing 
the effect of instabilities. In the experiments, we observe that the 
pure exponential function is highly unstable while the other strategies 
preserve accurate motion contours for a large range of parameters.