Patent ID: 6999612

Claim:
An image processing method for recovery of a scene structure from successive image data where motion of the scene structure is linear, the method comprising the steps of: (a) computing rotational motion in the successive image data using rotational flow vectors derived from a set of intensity data collected from the successive image data where the rotational flow vectors are represented by Ψ x ≡[∇I·r (1) ( p )], Ψ y ≡[∇I·r (2) ( p )], Ψ z ≡[∇I·r (3) ( p )], where ∇I represents a gradient of the intensity data r (1) , r (2) , r (3) are three-point rotational flows with respect to a pixel position p; (b) constructing a shift data representation for the intensity data that compensates for the rotational motion in the successive image data; (c) decomposing the shift data representation into a motion vector and a structure vector; (d) dividing the successive image data into smoothing windows; and (e) computing a projection matrix which is block diagonal between different smoothing windows and which is used to recover the scene structure by solving for the structure vector.