Decomposition of Optical Flow on the Sphere

We propose a number of variational regularisation methods for the estimation and decomposition of motion fields on the 2-sphere. While motion estimation is based on the optical flow equation, the presented decomposition models are motivated by recent trends in image analysis. In particular we treat u + v decomposition as well as hierarchical decomposition. Helmholtz decomposition of motion fields is obtained as a natural by-product of the chosen numerical method based on vector spherical harmonics. All models are tested on time-lapse microscopy data depicting fluorescently labelled endodermal cells of a zebrafish embryo.