Motion estimation

Motion vectors that result from a movement into the -plane of the image, combined with a lateral movement to the lower-right. This is a visualization of the motion estimation performed in order to compress an MPEG movie.

In computer vision and image processing, motion estimation is the process of determining motion vectors that describe the transformation from one 2D image to another; usually from adjacent frames in a video sequence. It is an ill-posed problem as the motion happens in three dimensions (3D) but the images are a projection of the 3D scene onto a 2D plane. The motion vectors may relate to the whole image (global motion estimation) or specific parts, such as rectangular blocks, arbitrary shaped patches or even per pixel. The motion vectors may be represented by a translational model or many other models that can approximate the motion of a real video camera, such as rotation and translation in all three dimensions and zoom.