Chaotic Phenomena from Motion in Image Sequences

Recent research in neural signals have shown biological neural systems are highly responsive to chaotic signals. In this paper, we analyze image sequences using tools from chaos theory associated with the phase plot of time series signals. We demonstrate that the changes in pixel amplitudes due to the motion of objects in an image sequence result in interesting behavior, visible as fractal patterns in the phase space, reminiscent of chaotic strange attractors. Likewise we demonstrate that changes in image amplitude due to spatio-temporally varying illumination are non-chaotic and well structured in phase space. We use the Lambertian reflectance model to explain the source of the non-linearities responsible for this chaotic behavior.