An Iterated Optical Flow Estimation Method for Automatically Tracking and Positioning Homologous Points in Video Image Sequences

The optical flow theory can be utilized for automatically tracking and positioning homologous points in digital video (DV) image sequences. In this paper, the Lucas-Kanade optical flow estimation (LKOFE) method and the normalized cross-correlation (NCC) method are compared and analyzed using the DV image sequences acquired by our SONY DCRPC115 DV camera. Thus, an improved optical flow estimation procedure, called 'Iterated Optical Flow Estimation (IOFE)', is presented. Our test results show that the trackable range of 3${\sim}$4 pixels in the LKOFE procedure can be apparently enlarged to 30 pixels in the IOFE.