Computational Aspects Of Determining Optical Flow

We study some computational aspects of determining optical flow. Necessary and sufficient con- ditions are investigated for the existence and uniqueness of the smoothing-spline from regularization. We discuss different boundary conditions: free, Neuman, and Dirich- let boundary conditions. We show that both free and Neuman boundary problems are ill-conditioned, and are not appropriate for optical flow computation. We discuss Dirichlet boundary problem in more details. As a com- mon practice in low-level vision, a continuous problem is formulated, and a discrete version of the problem is solved instead. We estimate the discretization errors, and com- pute the resulting discrete smoothing-splines. We study efficient iterative methods for solving the system of linear equations for the discrete smoothing-splines. We propose the Chebyshev method for the computation. The Cheby- shev method converges faster than the Gauss-Seidel and Jacobi methods, and is parallelizable.