Optical Flow Computation for Compound Eyes: Variational Analysis of Omni-Directional Views

This paper focuses on variational optical flow computation for spherical images. It is said that some insects recognise the world through optical flow observed by their compound eyes, which observe spherical views. Furthermore, images observed through a catadioptric system with a conic mirror and a fish-eye-lens camera are transformed to images on the sphere. Spherical motion field on the spherical retina has some advantages for the ego-motion estimation of autonomous mobile observer. We provide a framework for motion field analysis on the spherical retina using variational method for image analysis.