On Discontinuity-preserving Optic Flow

We investigate a modiication of Horn and Schunck's approach which leads to a better preservation of ow discontinuities. It replaces the quadratic smoothness term by a nonquadratic one. Energy minimization by steepest descent leads to a system of two nonlinear diiusion{reaction equations with a single common nonlinear diiusivity. This enables us to make use from techniques for nonlinear diiusion ltering of colour images. A recently discovered nonlinear diiusion algorithm is extended to the eecient approximation of the optic ow equations. Experiments on sequences of real-images illustrate that the presented approach leads to more realistic optic ow estimates than the Horn and Schunck method.