Computing Spatiotemporal Relations for Dynamic Perceptual Organization

To date, the overwhelming use of motion in computational vision has been to recover the three-dimensional structure of the scene. We propose that there are other, more powerful, uses for motion. Toward this end, we deene dynamic perceptual organization as an extension of the traditional (static) perceptual organization approach. Just as static perceptual organization groups coherent features in an image, dynamic perceptual organization groups coherent motions through an image sequence. Using dynamic perceptual organization, we propose a new paradigm for motion understanding and show why it can be done independently of the recovery of scene structure and scene motion. The paradigm starts with a spatiotemporal cube of image data and organizes the paths of points so that interactions between the paths and perceptual motions such as common, relative and cyclic are made explicit. The results of this can then be used for high-level motion recognition tasks.