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Particle Video: Long-Range Motion Estimation Using Point Trajectories

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Abstract

This paper describes a new approach to motion estimation in video. We represent video motion using a set of particles. Each particle is an image point sample with a long-duration trajectory and other properties. To optimize particle trajectories we measure appearance consistency along the particle trajectories and distortion between the particles. The resulting motion representation is useful for a variety of applications and cannot be directly obtained using existing methods such as optical flow or feature tracking. We demonstrate the algorithm on challenging real-world videos that include complex scene geometry, multiple types of occlusion, regions with low texture, and non-rigid deformations.

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Sand, P., Teller, S. Particle Video: Long-Range Motion Estimation Using Point Trajectories. Int J Comput Vis 80, 72–91 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11263-008-0136-6

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