Real-time motion estimation and visualization on graphics cards

We present a tool for real-time visualization of motion features in 2D image sequences. The motion is estimated through an eigenvector analysis of the spatio-temporal structure tensor at every pixel location. This approach is computationally demanding but allows reliable velocity estimates as well as quality indicators for the obtained results. We use a 2D color map and a region of interest selector for the visualization of the velocities. On the selected velocities we apply a hierarchical smoothing scheme which allows the choice of the desired scale of the motion field. We demonstrate several examples of test sequences in which some persons are moving with different velocities than others. These persons are visually marked in the real-time display of the image sequence. The tool is also applied to angiography sequences to emphasize the blood flow and its distribution. An efficient processing of the data streams is achieved by mapping the operations onto the stream architecture of standard graphics cards. The card receives the images and performs both the motion estimation and visualization, taking advantage of the parallelism in the graphics processor and the superior memory bandwidth. The integration of data processing and visualization also saves on unnecessary data transfers and thus allows the real-time analysis of 320×240 images. We expect that on the newest generation of graphics hardware our tool could run in real time for the standard VGA format.