A framework for modeling appearance change in image sequences

Image "appearance" may change over time due to a variety of causes such as: 1) object or camera motion; 2) generic photometric events including variations in illumination (e.g. shadows) and specular reflections; and 3) "iconic changes" which are specific to the objects being viewed and include complex occlusion events and changes in the material properties of the objects. We propose a general framework for representing and recovering these "appearance changes" in an image sequence as a "mixture" of different causes. The approach generalizes previous work on optical flow to provide a richer description of image events and more reliable estimates of image motion.