Optical flow or optic flow is the pattern of apparent motion of objects, surfaces, and edges in a visual scene caused by the relative motion between an observer (an eye or a camera) and the scene. Optical flow techniques such as motion detection, object segmentation, time-to-collision and focus of expansion calculations, motion compensated encoding, and stereo disparity measurement utilize this motion of the objects surfaces, and edges.

Sequences of ordered images allow the estimation of motion as either instantaneous image velocities or discrete image displacements. Fleet and Weiss provide a tutorial introduction to gradient based optical flow . John L. Barron, David J. Fleet, and Steven Beauchemin provides a performance analysis of a number of optical flow techniques. It emphasizes the accuracy and density of measurements.

The optical flow methods try to calculate the motion between two image frames which are taken at times t and t + δt at every voxel position. These methods are called differential since they are based on local Taylor series approximations of the image signal; that is, they use partial derivatives with respect to the spatial and temporal coordinates.

Motion estimation and video compression have developed as a major aspect of optical flow research. While the optical flow field is superficially similar to a dense motion field derived from the techniques of motion estimation, optical flow is the study of not only the determination of the optical flow field itself, but also of its use in estimating the three-dimensional nature and structure of the scene, as well as the 3D motion of objects and the observer relative to the scene.

Optical flow was used by robotics researchers in many areas such as: object detection and tracking, image dominant plane extraction, movement detection, robot navigation and visual odometry.

See also: Optical Flow

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