Velocity tuned generalized Sobel operators for multiresolution computation of optical flow

Optical flow computation may be divided into four processing steps where the first is extraction of image features suitable for flow estimation. Using a generalization of the basic flow constraint it is possible to estimate flow vectors from a set of feature images obtained from the input image sequence. Generalized Sobel operators provide a suitable set of feature extraction operators. The set of five filters up to second order provides good approximations of ideal edge and line detectors. A review of spatial and frequency constraints on optical flow suggests a multiresolution approach to optical flow where the initial feature extractors consists of velocity tuned operators. We show that two-dimensional generalized Sobel operators may be extended to spatio-temporal velocity tuned filters for optical flow estimation. Experimental results compare well to existing methods