A method has been developed for com

A method has been developed for computing optical flow from a sequence of images. It is based on the observation that the flow velocity has two components and that the basic equation for the rate of change of image brightness
provides only one constraint. Smoothness of the flow was introduced as a second constraint. An iterative method for solving the resulting equation was then developed. A simple implementation provided visual confirmation of
convergence of the solution in the form of needle diagrams. Examples of several different types of optical flow patterns were studied. These included cases where the Laplacian of the flow was zero as well as cases where it became
infinite at singular points or along bounding curves. The computed optical flow is somewhat inaccurate since it is based on noisy,
quantized measurements. Proposed methods for obtaining information about
the shapes of objects using derivatives (divergence and curl) of the optical flow
field may turn out to be impractical since the inaccuracies will be amplified.