Abstract
The precise measurement of the two-dimensional field of velocities from time-varying two-dimensional images is impossible in general. It is, however, possible to compute suitable 'optical flows' that are qualitatively similar to the velocity field in most cases. We describe a simple, parallel algorithm that computes an optical flow from sequences of real images, which is consistent with human psychophysics and suggests plausible physiological models. In particular, our algorithm runs on a Connection Machine supercomputer in close-to-real time. It shows several of the same "illusions9 that are perceived by humans. A natural physiological implementation of the model is consistent with data from cortical areas V1 and MT.
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Bülthoff, H., Little, J. & Poggio, T. A parallel algorithm for real-time computation of optical flow. Nature 337, 549–553 (1989). https://doi.org/10.1038/337549a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/337549a0
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