A Novel Approach to Motion Segmentation

This paper offers a novel means of segmenting independently moving objects from rigid backgrounds. The camera motion can be arbitrary with the proviso that independently moving objects are not moving parallel to it. A new method of treating visual motion is presented. The method relies on describing the motion of points in the world in terms of their angular velocity relative to the camera. In the case of a static scene the method permits the recovery of the direction of camera motion and the camera's angular velocity from the optical flow and its first derivatives at only three points.