Regularization of optical flow with M-band wavelet transform

The optical flow is an important tool for problems arising in the analysis of image sequences. Flow fields generated by various existing solving techniques are often noisy and partially incorrect, especially near occlusions or motion boundaries. Therefore, the additional information on the scene gained from a sequence of images is usually worse. In this paper, discrete wavelet transform has been adopted in order to enhance the reliability of optical flow estimation. A generalization of the well-known dyadic orthonormal wavelets to the case of the dilation scale factor M > 2 with N vanishing moments has been used, and it has proved to be a useful regularizing tool. The advantages in the computations have been shown by experimental results performed on real image sequences. © 2003 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.