Region-based optical flow estimation

A correspondence method is developed for determining optical flow where the primitive motion tokens to be matched between consecutive time frames are regions. The computation of optical flow consists of three stages: region extraction, region matching, and optical flow smoothing. The computation is completed by smoothing the initial optical flow, where the sparse velocity data are either smoothed with a vector median filter or interpolated to obtain dense velocity estimates by using a motion-coherence regularization. The proposed region-based method for optical flow is simple, computationally efficient, and more robust than iterative gradient methods, especially for medium-range motion