Patent ID: 7164800

Claim:
A method for determining motion vectors from one point in one image frame of a scene to corresponding points in at least two other image frames of the scene, utilizing one or more cameras, said method comprising the steps of: providing first, second, and third images of a scene under perspective projection with unconstrained motion of the one or more cameras, wherein points (x′,y′) and (x″,y″) in the second and third frames are projections of the same spatial points (x,y) in the first frame; specifying a system of trifocal tensors and optical flow equations that describe point correspondence across the three images; and applying both a geometric constraint of trilinearity and an appearance constraint of constant brightness, thereby utilizing a trilinear constraint and a constant brightness constraint to obtain the pointwise displacement between the three frames simultaneously; wherein said providing further comprises capturing said first, second, and third images with said one or more cameras.