Computation of discontinuous optical flow fields based on spatiotemporal bilateral filtering

In this study, we propose a new multi-frame method to compute a smooth and boundary preserving optical flow estimate. The approach is based on the bilateral filtering, a fast edge preserving smoothing tool. Inspired by the variational origin of the bilateral filter, we construct an energy functional that takes into account the image brightness conservation constraint and the bilateral smoothness of the optical flow. Minimization of this energy functional is performed using the Gauss Seidel iterations. Experimental results on synthetic and real image sequences demonstrate that the proposed approach yields an optical flow that is smooth and yet motion boundary preserving.