Dense optical flow by iterative local window registration

Abstract

We study dense optical flow estimation using iterative registration of local window, also known as iterative Lucas-Kanade (LK) [B. Lucas et al, 1981]. We show that the usual iterative-warping scheme encounters divergence problems and propose a modified scheme with better behavior. It yields good results with a much lower cost than the exact dense LK algorithm, on simulated and real sequences.