Bülthoff H, Little J, Poggio T
Center for Biological Information Processing, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139.
Nature. 1989 Feb 9;337(6207):549-55. doi: 10.1038/337549a0.
The precise management of two-dimensional field of velocities from time-varying two-dimensional images is impossible in general. It is, however, possible to compute suitable 'optical flows' that are qualitatively similar to the velocity field in most cases. We describe a simple, parallel algorithm that computes an optical flow from sequences of real images, which is consistent with human psychophysics and suggests plausible physiological models. In particular, our algorithm runs on a Connection Machine supercomputer in close-to-real time. It shows several of the same 'illusions' that are perceived by humans. A natural physiological implementation of the model is consistent with data from cortical areas V1 and MT.
