Estimating optical flow by tracking contours

Abstract

We present a novel method of velocity field estimation for the points on moving contours in a 2-D image sequence. The method determines the corresponding point in a next image frame by minimizing the curvature change of a given contour point. As a first step, snakes are used to locate smooth curves in 2-D imagery. Thereafter, the extracted curves are tracked continuously computing the corresponding point for each contour point. (C) 1997 Published by Elsevier Science B.V.