Confidence measures for block matching motion estimation

This paper addresses the problem of deriving measures that express the degree of the reliability of motion vectors estimated by a block matching motion estimation method. We express the block matching motion estimation scheme in the probabilistic framework and derive the confidence measures in terms of the a-posteriori probabilities of the estimated vectors. The type of the underlying conditional probability distribution of the motion compensated intensity differences (e.g. Laplacian) is derived from the objective criterion of the block matching estimator. All parameters are estimated from data that are derived as a by-product of the motion estimation scheme. The derivation is incorporated in a multiscale scheme. Experimental results are presented for image sequences with known ground-truth motion.