This paper presents a novel approach for estimating the flow fields of dynamic temporal textures whose motion differs radically from that of rigid bodies. Our approach is based on a local flow probability distribution function at each pixel using the STAR model and the data from a spatio-temporal neighborhood. The peak of this density function can be regarded as the estimated local flow vector. Our complete algorithm exploits a two-stage process. The first stage of the algorithm applies a simple tensor method to estimate the direction of the optical flow at each pixel in the texture. In the second stage, the flow probability function is used to perform a one-dimensional search along the flow direction to obtain the magnitude. Performance analysis and experiments with real video sequences show that our methods can successfully estimate flow fields.
David Edwards, Johnny T. Chang, Lin Shi, Yizhou Yu