Establishing motion correspondence using extended temporal scope

This paper addresses the motion correspondence problem: the problem of finding corresponding point measurements in an image sequence solely based on positional information. The motion correspondence problem is most difficult when the target points are densely moving. It becomes even harder when the point detection scheme is imperfect or when points are temporarily occluded. Available motion constraints should be exploited in order to rule out physically impossible assignments of measurements to point tracks. The performance can be further increased by deferring the correspondence decisions, that is, by examining whether the consequences of candidate correspondences lead to alternate and better solutions. In this paper, we concentrate on the latter by introducing a scheme that extends the temporal scope over which the correspondences are optimized. The consequent problem we are faced with is a multi-dimensional assignment problem, which is known to be NP-hard. To restrict the consequent increase in computation time, the candidate solutions are suitably ordered and then additional combined motion constraints are imposed. Experiments show the appropriateness of the proposed extension, both with respect to performance as well as computational aspects.