Extraction of motion parallax structure in the visual system. I.

We present a paradigm to estimate local affine motion parallax structure from a varying image irradiance pattern. The method is based on a matching of jets of irradiance rather than the local image irradiance pattern or features of it. It does not put any constraints on the structure of the image irradiance pattern. Moreover, the aperture problem does not arise and additional ad hoc constraints on the velocity field like the "smoothness constraint" are superfluous. An implementation is designed such that the affine structure of the local motion parallax field is represented through simple combinations of the outputs of physiologically plausible receptive fields and their temporal derivatives.