Image Flow

So, to detect occlusions, pretty much the first step in any case is to calculate the image flow (aka optical flow, free flow, etc). This is very similar to feature tracking, except with feature tracking the goal is to follow certain things from frame to frame, and with image flow you want to see how EVERYTHING moves from frame to frame.

Why is this important to occlusions? If you calculate the image flow, you will notice certain regions will disappear from the image flow from frame to frame. This gives an idea of what regions are in front of other regions.

The problem? Image Flow is actually pretty difficult to calculate accurately. However, I think I've found some MATLAB code by Temu Gautama that seems to do a decent job. I added a link to it on the side bar.

The next step is to take the image flows calculated between various images and use them to find all the occlusions. We'll see how long it takes me to get stuck this time. :-)