Principle of superposition: a common computational framework for analysis of multiple motion

The principle of superposition is applied to various motion estimation problems. It can potentially resolve the difficulty of analyzing multiple motion, transparent motion and motion boundaries by using a common mathematical structure. The authors demonstrate that, by applying the principle, the techniques of optical flow, 3D motion and structure from flow fields, direct method for 3D motion and structure recovery, motion and structure from correspondences in two frames can be extended coherently to deal with multiple motion. The theory not only produces multiple-motion versions of the existing algorithms, but also provides tools for the theoretical analysis of multiple motion. Since the approach is not at the algorithm level as are conventional segmentation paradigms, but at the level of computational theory, i.e. of constraints, theoretical results derived also contribute to psychophysical and physiological studies on the preattentive stages of biological motion vision systems. The paper emphasizes the universality of the principle