Identifying centers of circulating and spiraling flow patterns

Identification of centers of circulating and spiraling vector fields, sources and sinks are important in many applications. Tropical cyclone tracking, rotating object identification, analysis of motion video and movement of fluids are but some examples. In this paper, we introduce a framework for finding the centers of circulating and spiraling fields. It can handle vector fields constructed by motion estimation of objects observed at an oblique angle. We provide theoretical analysis on the validity of our method, and application examples in the fields of multimedia processing and meteorological computing to demonstrate its practical use