Tracking of Image Intensities Based on Optical Flow: An Evaluation of Nonlinear Diffusion Process

Image smoothing based on anisotropic diffusion provides better performance than classical linear filtering. One difficulty is to compare and evaluate the different models proposed. Since the basic model arises from fluid mechanics, we propose to track anisotropic diffusion using an optical flow technique through a new physics based image model. Consequently to this, we propose a new choice for the conductance function which is easier to control. We demonstrate with the optical flow tracking that this function has a better behavior concerning the gradient threshold than the known conductance functions.