On analyzing video with very small motions

Abstract

We characterize a class of videos consisting of very small but potentially complicated motions. We find that in these scenes, linear appearance variations have a direct relationship to scene motions. We show how to interpret appearance variations captured through a PCA decomposition of the image set as a scene-specific non-parametric motion basis. We propose fast, robust tools for dense flow estimates that are effective in scenes with small motions and potentially large image noise. We show example results in a variety of applications, including motion segmentation and long-term point tracking.