An effective motion object detection method using optical flow estimation under a moving camera

Optical flow techniques have been applied to motion object detection under a moving camera over the years. In this paper, we propose an effective motion object detection method based on optical flow estimation, characterized in that the complete boundary of the motion object can be extracted from the combination of the optimized horizontal flow with the optimized vertical flow. The optimized horizontal flow and the optimized vertical flow can be obtained as follows: introducing a third frame into the two frames to obtain the horizontal flow and the vertical flow, and then optimizing the horizontal flow and the vertical flow by applying gradient function and threshold method, respectively. The complete boundary of the motion object, after being subjected to region filling, could be optimized by Gaussian filtering technique to obtain the final detection results. Our proposed method is tested on the following datasets consisting of Cdnet2014, KITTI2015, MPI Sintel datasets, natural YouTube sequences and the collected data, respectively. The results show that our proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art significantly.