Spatio-temporal analysis for velocity estimation of contours in an image sequence with occlusion

A method is presented for analyzing a sequence of closely sampled images, forming a spatio-temporal volume. It is proposed to find the normal velocity component of each edge point by making assumptions about this scene, such as smooth motion, common motion and constant illumination. The resulting normal velocity field can then be used to resolve the real velocity field and to perform segmentation. The system is quite robust and is capable of handling occlusion as well as disocclusion. Results are presented on synthetic data consisting of two objects moving with occlusion and on real image sequences