Tracking moving object in 3-D space based on optical flow and edges

This paper describes a method of extracting a moving object in a 3-D space in a cluttered back ground by integrating optical flow and edges. The method extracts objects even if their appearance change and the flow vectors of the objects are not uniform. We segment the image into regions so that the motion of each region may be approximated by the 3-D motion of a plane. In order to represent the whole contour of the regions even in a cluttered background, the brightness edges near the motion boundary are accumulated over frames. The contour of the region is composed of the motion boundary and the accumulated edges. The object is composed of adjacent regions which have similar 3-D motion parameters. Experimental results for synthetic and real images show that this method extracts objects even if the appearance of the objects change drastically.