Variational Multi-Valued Velocity Field Estimation for Transparent Sequences

Motion estimation in sequences with transparencies is an important problem in robotics and medical imaging applications. In this work we propose a variational approach for estimating multi-valued velocity fields in transparent sequences. Starting from existing local motion estimators, we derive a variational model for integrating in space and time such a local information in order to obtain a robust estimation of the multi-valued velocity field. With this approach, we can indeed estimate multi-valued velocity fields which are not necessarily piecewise constant on a layer—each layer can evolve according to a non-parametric optical flow. We show how our approach outperforms existing methods; and we illustrate its capabilities on challenging experiments on both synthetic and real sequences.