Real-time quantized optical flow

Algorithms based on the correlation of image patches can be robust in practice but are computationally intensive due to the computational complexity of their search-based nature. Performing the search over time instead of over space is linear in nature, rather than quadratic, and results in a very efficient algorithm. This, combined with implementations which are highly efficient on standard computing hardware, yields performance of 9 frames/sec on a scientific workstation. Although the resulting velocities are quantized with resulting quantization error, they have been shown to be sufficiently accurate for many robotic vision tasks such as time-to-collision and robotic navigation. Thus, this algorithm is highly suitable for real-time robotic vision research. (C) 1997 Academic Press Limited.