A method for determining motion vectors from one point in one image frame
of a scene to corresponding points in at least two other image frames of
the scene, wherein the frames are obtained in a capture process utilizing
one or more cameras, wherein the method employs an iterative and
hierarchical dense motion estimation that computes the
geometry-consistent and appearance-consistent motion fields between three
images simultaneously by enforcing both a trilinear constraint and a
constant-brightness constraint. This method includes the steps of:
providing first, second and third images of a scene under perspective
projection with unconstrained motion of the camera, wherein points
(x',y') and (x'',y'') in the second and third frames are projections of
the same spatial points (x,y) in the first frame; specifying a system of
trifocal tensors and optical flow equations that describe point
correspondence across the three images; and applying both a geometric
constraint of trilinearity and an appearance constraint of constant
brightness, thereby utilizing a trilinear constraint and a constant
brightness constraint to obtain the pointwise displacement between the
three frames simultaneously.