Direct analytical methods for solving Poisson equations in computer vision problems

Direct analytical methods are discussed for solving Poisson equations of the general form Δu=f on a rectangular domain. Some embedding techniques that may be useful when boundary conditions (obtained from stereo and occluding boundary) are defined on arbitrary contours are described. The suggested algorithms are computationally efficient owing to the use of fast orthogonal transforms. Applications to shape from shading, lightness and optical flow problems are also discussed. A proof for the existence and convergence of the flow estimates is given. Experiments using synthetic images indicate that results comparable to those using multigrid can be obtained in a very small number of iterations