Compass rose: A rotational robust signature for optical flow computation

Abstract

This paper proposes a new image signature, called Compass Rose, which is particularly suited to optical flow computation. It is differentiable, fast to compute, and robust to additive illumination changes, translation, and fast rotation. We design a sparse flow computation system based on the invariance of the Compass Rose signatures. This is then extended to dense motion estimation by the addition of an optional diffusion step. Quantitative testing on several benchmark sequences shows the Compass Rose attains higher accuracy than the traditional flow signatures under a range of conditions. Finally, we demonstrate its application to human motion estimation, which is challenging for optical flow methods due to fast limb rotation.