Bayesian selection of scaling laws for motion modeling in images

Based on scaling laws describing the statistical structure of turbulent motion across scales, we propose a multiscale and non-parametric regularizer for optic-flow estimation. Regularization is achieved by constraining motion increments to behave through scales as the most likely self-similar process given some image data. In a first level of inference, the hard constrained minimization problem is optimally solved by taking advantage of lagrangian duality. It results in a collection of first-order regularizers acting at different scales. This estimation is non-parametric since the optimal regularization parameters at the different scales are obtained by solving the dual problem. In a second level of inference, the most likely self-similar model given the data is optimally selected by maximization of Bayesian evidence. The motion estimator accuracy is first evaluated on a synthetic image sequence of simulated bi-dimensional turbulence and then on a real meteorological image sequence. Results obtained with the proposed physical based approach exceeds the best state of the art results. Furthermore, selecting from images the most evident multiscale motion model enables the recovery of physical quantities, which are of major interest for turbulence characterization.