Computation of Optical Flow

Optical flow is the distribution of apparent velocities of moving brightness patterns in an image. Ideally the optical flow corresponds to the motion field, but this is not always true [Hor86]. It is common to assume that the optical flow is not too different from the motion field. Under this assumption, the optical flow can be used for segmenting images into regions and estimating the object motion in the scene [Adi85].