11 Facts About Optical flow

Optical flow can be defined as the distribution of apparent velocities of movement of brightness pattern in an image.

Concept of optical flow was introduced by the American psychologist James J Gibson in the 1940s to describe the visual stimulus provided to animals moving through the world.

Term optical flow is used by roboticists, encompassing related techniques from image processing and control of navigation including motion detection, object segmentation, time-to-contact information, focus of expansion calculations, luminance, motion compensated encoding, and stereo disparity measurement.

Optical flow methods try to calculate the motion between two image frames which are taken at times and at every voxel position.

All optical flow methods introduce additional conditions for estimating the actual flow.

Optical flow was used by robotics researchers in many areas such as: object detection and tracking, image dominant plane extraction, movement detection, robot navigation and visual odometry.

Optical flow information has been recognized as being useful for controlling micro air vehicles.

Application of optical flow includes the problem of inferring not only the motion of the observer and objects in the scene, but the structure of objects and the environment.

Optical flow sensors are used extensively in computer optical mice, as the main sensing component for measuring the motion of the mouse across a surface.

Optical flow sensors are being used in robotics applications, primarily where there is a need to measure visual motion or relative motion between the robot and other objects in the vicinity of the robot.

The use of optical flow sensors in unmanned aerial vehicles, for stability and obstacle avoidance, is an area of current research.