3D Optical Flow Estimation Combining 3D Census Signature and Total Variation Regularization

Sandeep Manandhar, Patrick Bouthemy, Erik Welf, Philippe Roudot, Charles Kervrann

Abstract: We present a 3D optical flow method for 3D fluorescence image sequences which preserves discontinuities in the computed flow field. We propose to minimize an energy function composed of a linearized 3D Census signature-based data term and a total variational (TV) regularizer. To demonstrate the efficiency of our method, we have applied it to real sequences depicting collagen network, where the motion field is expected to be discontinuous. We also favorably compare our results with two other motion estimation methods.