On-line Video Motion Estimation by Invariant Receptive Inputs

In this paper, we address the problem of estimating the optical flow in long-term video sequences. We devise a com- putational scheme that exploits the idea of receptive fields, in which the pixel flow does not only depends on the brightness level of the pixel itself, but also on neighborhood-related information. Our approach relies on the definition of receptive units that are invariant to affine transformations of the input data. This distinguishing characteristic allows us to build a video-receptive-inputs database with arbitrary detail level, that can be used to match local features and to determine their motion. We propose a parallel computational scheme, well suited for nowadays parallel architectures, to exploit motion information and invariant features from real-time video streams, for deep feature extraction, object detection, tracking, and other applications.