Wednesday, August 10, 2016

A Tutorial on Motion Estimation

Parameters of three-dimensional motion (rotation, translation) play an important role in image motion modeling. If these parameters are known precisely, the object motion can be accurately predicted. The 3D relative movement of objects and camera induces 2D motion on the image plane via a suitable projection system called as apparent motion or optical flow. Motion is perceived when a change in the image intensity on the screen is seen.

Motion estimation methods

• feature/region matching methods
• pel-recursive methods
• deterministic model based methods
• stochastic model based methods
• optical flow based methods
1. feature/region matching methods
Estimate motion by correlating/matching features or particular regions of the sequence from one frame to another.
Matching process –
Assumed that pixels belonging to the block are displaced with the same amount, which means a requirement of smoothness and decreasing side information on motion vectors.
The metrics used to perform motion estimation by block matching can be either maximizing the cross-correlation function or minimizing an error criterion.
There are two type of search strategies
1.      full-search (exhaustive)
The former is an exhaustive search within a predetermined maximum displacement range.
2.      suboptimal (non-exhaustive)
The latter is a non-exhaustive search procedure specified to decrease the search time, developed in several algorithms.
a.      2D logarithmic search
·         Stepwise implementation
·         evaluating the matching criterion for five points (the center of the search window and the four midpoints between the center and the four borders)
·         winner-one showing minimum dissimilarity among them
·         other four points around the winner with unchanged distance are taken, unless the current central point or a boundary point give a minimum matching criterion value. In this case, the distance among the five points has to be reduced. The minimum is reached when the last set of points is on a 3 × 3 2D grid.
b.      Conjugate direction search
·         two step approach,
·         matching criterion is evaluated separately by rows and then by columns, or vice versa
·         The row coordinate is fixed at an initial position, and the minimum of the chosen criterion is found along the horizontal direction. Then, the same kind of evaluation is done for the vertical direction starting from the column coordinate obtained by the previous step.
c.       Multiresolution block matching
There are pyramid with set of images, taken at different resolutions
lowest level is the original image itself,
at each step, the upper level is obtained low-pass filtering the lower one using particular weights, and then subsampling by 2×2
search algorithm finds the initial motion vectors estimation starting from the top,
and then refine them on, making them propagate to the next level. Each level gives an
improvement in the evaluation of the vectors.
d.      Hierarchical block matching
Method first applied to the two frames at their lowest resolution level. (From low to high)
the result of each level is passed onto the next higher resolution level and used as initial estimates of the displacement vector field. These initial values are then updated by the values

lower resolution levels purpose -  estimate the major part of the displacement;
higher resolution levels purpose -  fine-tune the estimates obtained at lower resolution levels.

e.       Overlapped block matching
·         to reduce or totally eliminate blocking artefacts.
·         applying a windowing function to the error and then evaluated the “windowed MAD” to find the best match and consequently the displacement vector.
·         This method leads to both a good trade-off between higher computational cost and also less prediction error.


2.Pel-recursive methods
Aims to estimate the displacement vectors for each pixel of a frame in a recursive manner. This is done using a recursive method (called descent method) that moves pixel by pixel both spatially (horizontally and vertically) and temporally (same position in two consecutive frames).
Several algorithms have been developed in this field, which mainly differ on the
kind of approach they implement.

·         Netravali-Robbins
It is based on the steepest descent algorithm and it aims to estimate the motion
vectors minimizing the squared DFD (Displacement Frame Difference). The estimated displacement is defined in a recursive
way
·         Bergmann
He proposed a modified version of the Netravalli-Robbins by using the Newton-
Raphson’s algorithm instead of the steepest descent one. The advantage is that the proposed

method converges to the minimum faster than using the steepest descent one

3.Optical flow based methods

Several techniques have been developed to approach the computation of optical flow
  • ·         Gradient-based approach

The first method being proposed is the Horn and Schunck one. The method initially makes the assumption of moving object and moving sensor. The second method is the Lucas and Kanade one. The iteration is not done in a strict pixel by pixel way, but considering a small neighborhood of the pixel.

  • ·         Correlation-based approach

The frame is here divided into fixed-size non overlapping blocks and a matching by a searching window defined by some a priori rule is performed through the image. The displacement to the block that shows the highest likelihood or the lowest dissimilarity is taken as measure of the translation a motion vector to our reference block.

  • ·         Spatio-temporal energy based approach


Gabor filter is able to select some frequency components from the signal it is filtering. The main idea is to detect motion in the frequency domain, usingparticular spatiotemporal filters, Gabor energy filters

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