A multi-aperture optical flow estimation method for an artificial compound eye

作者:Wu, Sidong; Zhang, Gexiang*; Neri, Ferrante; Zhu, Ming; Jiang, Tao; Kuhnert, Klaus-Dieter
来源:Integrated Computer-Aided Engineering, 2019, 26(2): 139-157.
DOI:10.3233/ICA-180593

摘要

An artificial compound eye (ACE) is a bio-inspired vision sensor which mimics a natural compound eye (typical of insects). This artificial eye is able to visualize large fields of the outside world through multi-aperture. Due to its functioning, the ACE is subject to optical flow, that is an apparent motion of the object visualized by the eye. This paper proposes a method to estimate the optical flow based on capturing multiple images (multi-aperture). In this method, based on descriptors-based initial optical flows, a unified global energy function is presented to incorporate the information of multi-aperture and simultaneously recover the optical flows of multi-aperture. The energy function imposes a compound flow fields consistency assumption along with the brightness constancy and piecewise smoothness assumptions. This formula efficiently binds the flow field in time and space, and further enables view-consistent optical flow estimation. Experimental results on real and synthetic data demonstrate that the proposed method recovers view-consistent optical flows crossed multi-aperture and performs better than other optical flow methods on the multi-aperture images.