Total-variation regularized motion estimation in a periodic image sequence

Recently we investigated the use of a Fourier harmonic model for determining the optical flow in a periodic image sequence, the goal of which was to exploit the temporal continuity and periodicity in the underlying motion field. In this work, we further develop this optical flow model by incorporating a spatially piecewise smoothness constraint (in the form of total variation) in order to better accommodate the discontinuity of the motion field at an object boundary. In the experiments, we demonstrate its benefits for noise reduction in motion-compensated 4D reconstruction of cardiac gated images. Our results show that it could lead to more accurate reconstruction of the myocardium in spite of strong imaging noise.